Category Archives: focus on faculty

Remembering Marty Perlmutter

Photo Credit: College of Charleston/Provided

Remembering Marty Perlmutter

Dr. Larry Krasnoff

Martin Perlmutter, former professor of philosophy and director of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, died January 16, 2023, a few months short of his eightieth birthday. Marty was a widely known and much-loved figure on campus and in the Charleston community. He had been ill with leukemia for ten years, but with the help of advanced medical treatments, had been living an active life until the last few months.

Marty came to the College in 1979, from the University of Texas at Austin. Born and raised in New York City, he earned his B.A. from the City University of New York and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. His main philosophical interests were in bioethics and philosophy of religion.

He served as chair of the department from 1983 to 1991, significantly raising the profile of the department within the institution and the profession. Under his initiative, the department started a program and a major in religious studies, which eventually became an independent department. He also helped start a program in Jewish Studies, and became its director in 1991. He eventually gave up his appointment in Philosophy, but continued to teach philosophy courses until his retirement in 2019.

It was in Jewish Studies that Marty achieved the remarkable institutional successes that built his legacy. He sponsored public events that attracted wide community audiences, such as Sunday brunch lectures, panel discussions with the local rabbis from the three main branches of Judaism, and the Hanukkah celebration in Marion Square – all of which continue today. With community support, he raised a significant endowment for Jewish Studies. He created a non-profit corporation to purchase the site of what was once a dry cleaning shop, and built what is now the Jewish Studies Center. He recruited significantly larger numbers of Jewish students to the College and sponsored a thriving Hillel chapter. Under his supervision, Jewish Studies grew into an independent academic unit with its own faculty lines, a major, and a minor. The kosher/vegan dining facility in the Jewish Center is now the Dr. Martin Perlmutter Dining Hall. But everyone knows it as “Marty’s Place.”

Marty devoted his life to serving the academic and the Jewish communities, and to building institutions that made those communities stronger and richer. Everyone in those communities seemed to know Marty, his wife Jeri, his four children, and eventually his eleven grandchildren. He made everyone part of his family, and he never stopped enjoying making his family bigger. The force of his personality and the institutions he built will long endure in the memories and the lives of everyone who came to know him, and they will enrich generations of students and faculty who have not even yet arrived on our campus.

Prof. Coseru Awarded NEH Summer Institute Grant

Christian Coseru was awarded $164,585 to stage a two-week “Self-Knowledge in Eastern and Western Philosophies” Summer Institute in 2018. Professors Jay Garfield of Smith College and Harvard University, and Evan Thompson of the University of British Columbia will co-direct the institute, which will also involve contributions by 14 distinguished faculty from major universities in the United States, Denmark, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Prof. McKinnon’s Book The Norms of Assertion Published

Professor Rachel McKinnon’s book The Norms of Assertion: Truth, Lies, and Warrant has been published by Palgrave MacMillan Press.

From the publisher:

Suppose that you ask me what time an upcoming meeting starts, and I say, ‘4 p.m.’ Whenever we make claims like this, we’re asserting. If the meeting is really at 3:30 p.m., you’ll be late, and probably rather upset that I told you the wrong time. In some sense, it seems like I’m on the hook for having said something false. This sense that I’ve done something wrong suggests that there are certain standards of evaluating assertions: a way of distinguishing between good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. We call these standards norms.

This book is about the norms of assertion. Various philosophers have typically attempted to articulate the level of epistemic support required for properly asserting. Some argue, for example, that one must know what one asserts. Others argue that one merely needs to justifiably believe what one asserts–an epistemic standing weaker than knowledge. The purpose of this book is to defend what I propose as the central norm governing our practice of assertion, which I call the Supportive Reasons Norm (SRN).

In rough outline, the standards for warrantedly asserting shift with changes in context, although knowledge is never required for warrantedly asserting. In fact, in some special contexts, speakers may warrantedly lie. This latter feature particularly sets apart my view from others in the debate.

Prof. Mckinnon giving keynote at McMaster University Sexual Harassment in Academia and the Workplace conference

Prof. Rachel McKinnon gave the keynote talk yesterday at the Sexual Harassment in Academia and the Workplace conference/workshop held at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) held by CUPE 3906. Her talk was titled, “Allies Behaving Badly,” which will be appearing as a paper, “Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic Injustice” in the Routledge Handbook on Epistemic Injustice.