Scharp from Twente to Illinois


Kevin Scharp, currently at the University of Twente, will be moving to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he will be Professor of Philosophy.

Professor Scharp, who prior to his position as a research at Twente was a Reader at the University of St. Andrews and a full professor at philosophy at the Ohio State University, works in philosophy of artificial intelligence, philosophy of language, logic, ethics, philosophy of science,  and the history of analytic philosophy. You can learn more about his work here and here.

He will take up his new position at Illinois this fall, while maintaining an affiliation with the multi-university Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT) project, of which Twente is a part.

Readers may recall the announcement last month regarding Illinois hiring John Schwenkler. The head of philosophy at Illinois, Rob Kar, notes that the department has also just hired Alison Duncan Kerr as an assistant professor, has voted out two further offers for senior level hires to be processed next year, and will be searching at the senior level again next fall. He says that the hires are

part of a larger, multi-year hiring objective. The philosophy department at the University of Illinois has been growing at an incredibly rapid pace. Even as it continues to grow, it already serves more than double the average number of majors than it did for decades prior the last several years. We have been seeing large increases in enrollment both in our ordinary philosophy major and in our innovative CS+Philosophy major, which helps educate future leaders who are not only technically competent but also capable of addressing rigorously the moral, social, political, and philosophical dimensions of critical questions raised by technological changes in the digital world. This is the most fundamental transformation in social life of our era—akin to those brought on in earlier era by the Enlightenment and the rise of the natural sciences, the religious wars of the 17th century, or the industrial revolution.  


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Neil Tennant
10 months ago

Welcome back, Kevin and Ali!