Hello! My name is Vivian Feldblyum, and this Fall I’ll be starting my seventh (!) year as a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy. My main research interests lie at the intersection of moral psychology, metaethics, and Ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle). I am also interested in the history of philosophical skepticism in the ancient world, especially the varieties of linguistic skepticism found in ancient India and China (early Buddhism and Daoism, respectively). My current work is concerned with the nature of pleasure, and my dissertation develops an account of pleasure on which it is best understood as a non-intellectual form of evaluative cognition. Ultimately, my current research aims at bridging the gap between scientific approaches to understanding pleasure as a biological mechanism involved in action and traditional moral philosophy which asks questions about the relationship between pleasure and value, as well as the role pleasure should play in a good life.

As a philosopher, it is difficult to be interested in the relationship between philosophy and science and avoid coming into contact with 20^th century analytic philosophy, which includes logicians and philosophers of science like Carl Hempel, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many more. The 20^th century was an era in which philosophy of science, mathematics, and logic took center stage. This was especially true in Austria in the 1920s and 1930s, when a group of philosophers called the Vienna Circle (including the philosophers I mentioned above) met regularly to discuss these topics and played a key role in the advent of logical empiricism and logical positivism in the philosophy of the time.

One of the lesser known members of the Vienna Circle was a Polish logician named Rose Rand, who among other things kept extensive records of the philosophical discussions of the Circle. Her burgeoning academic career was impeded by two factors – being a woman and being a Jew – which in 1930s Austria meant she was barred from getting a job as an academic. She managed to flee Austria and escape the Holocaust by going to England as a refugee, but she was similarly unable to secure academic jobs there and worked whatever jobs she could find, from manual labor to nursing. She eventually made her way to the United States, where she continued to have trouble getting her foot in the door of the academy – though not for lack of trying. As Princeton University professor John V. Fleming put it, “[i]n the era of post-War academic life in the universities of Western Europe and North America, many intellectual refugees from Nazism and Communism flourished, won prizes, made great contributions to their fields; but many others could barely hang on by a fingernail.  Such is one of the injustices that encourage the tragic sense of life.”