Quill Kukla

Georgetown University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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AKA Rebecca Kukla
Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University
Humboldt Scholar, Leibniz Universität Hannover

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Jo Hsu

The University of Texas at Austin

Alison Reiheld

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Megan A Dean

Michigan State University

Amy A . Ross Arguedas

University of Oxford

Goran Patriksson

University of Gothenburg

Sarah Cavar

University of California, Davis

Alexandre Baril

University of Ottawa | Université d'Ottawa

Tammy George

University of Toronto

Geneviève Rail

Concordia University (Canada)

Mauro Turrini

CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas-Spanish National Research Council)

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Papers by Quill Kukla

Healthism, Elite Capture, and the Pitfalls of an Expansive Concept of Health

A Pragmatic Approach to Conceptualization of Health and Disease, 2024

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EPISTEMIC DIVERSITY, IGNORANCE, AND NON-IDEAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF NON-IDEAL THEORY, 2024

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The Pragmatics of Technologically Mediated Online Speech: “Don’t @ Me!”

The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language, 2024

This chapter explores the social force and pragmatic structure of an emerging new class of speech... more This chapter explores the social force and pragmatic structure of an emerging new class of speech acts-including, for instance, 'liking', retweeting, and 'at'-ing-that have only recently become possible to perform. New technology and communication infrastructure is generating the possibility of new pragmatic forms of speaking, which can have no face-to-face equivalent. Standard pragmatic types of speech acts-interrogatives, promises, imperatives, and so forth-are essentially mediumindependent; they can be performed with one's voice, in writing, over electronic media, in sign language, etc. But as the chapter will try to show, other pragmatic speech-act types are inherently medium-dependent and technologically mediated. It will defend two theses: (1) the technologically enabled online speech acts it explores have distinctive pragmatic structures, which are irreducible to speech-act types performed over other media or in person; and (2) many of these online speech acts are socially potent: they serve to constitute and organize social space in important ways. In particular, they are used to negotiate and solidify the boundaries between group insiders and outsiders and the norms of social engagement within groups

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Uptake and refusal

Inquiry, 2023

Discussions of uptake in the philosophy of language focus our attention on what role other people... more Discussions of uptake in the philosophy of language focus our attention on what role other people have in fixing the import, success, influence and social life of a speech act. The general idea in most discussions of uptake, despite their differences and disagreements, is whether and how an audience is cooperative or uncooperative when a speaker plays a critical role in how speech acts function. This essay is primarily concerned with "refusals", or uncooperative uptakes. The essay analyzes the varieties of refusal; when refusal is possible why it might be challenging and when it is ethical. It examines how and when the uptake of a speech act can constitute the pragmatic form and force of the original speech act.

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The Ethics of Retraction

This essay examines the ethics of retraction, using the tools of speech act theory. We are fundam... more This essay examines the ethics of retraction, using the tools of speech act theory. We are fundamentally imperfect beings who make mistakes, as any ethics usable in the actual world needs to acknowledge. Because we make mistakes, _repair_ is an essential category of ethical action. Retraction has many uses, and not all of them are reparative. But, I will argue, retraction is a central tool of repair. We use retraction to repair ourselves, and to repair the social world, including our relationships. Thus understanding the ethics of retraction is philosophically pressing. I begin the essay by offering a pragmatic analysis of retraction and its success conditions. I will then make the case for why retraction is ethically substantive, and for the need for a developed ethics of retraction. After that, I divide my analysis into three parts. I ask: When is retraction _possible_; when is it ethically _permissible_; and, finally, when is it ethically _advisable or obligatory_, as part of a p...

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Public artifacts and the epistemology of collective material testimony

Philosophical Issues

Knowing things and going places

European Journal of Philosophy, May 5, 2022

When I say &quot;I know Sarah&quot;, or &quot;I know Berlin&quot;, what sort of k... more When I say &quot;I know Sarah&quot;, or &quot;I know Berlin&quot;, what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place, as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or &#39;objectual knowledge&#39; as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological sort. It is a genre of inherently first-personal aesthetic knowledge, but it is also, like know-how, an active skill. I end by exploring a couple of classic problems in aesthetic epistemology, applied to the case of knowledge-of as active aesthetic knowledge.

The Repurposed City of Berlin

City Living

This chapter explores the landscape of Berlin, taken as a city that shapes the agency of its inha... more This chapter explores the landscape of Berlin, taken as a city that shapes the agency of its inhabitants, and shows how, conversely, the residents of Berlin have remade spaces in their city to suit their needs. Berlin is a repurposed city: it was built to support a series of spatial and political orders that are now defunct, and its material structure must now be reused by different residents inhabiting a different order. In particular, the Cold War division of Berlin into east and west, divided by the Berlin Wall, fundamentally shaped the space of the city, and postunification residents must find ways to creatively repurpose this space. The chapter begins with the spatial history of Berlin and an analysis of its current spatial logic. It then provides detailed explorations and readings of a series of repurposed spaces within the city, comparing their present and past uses and meanings, and situating them within the history and spatial logic of each city.

Editor's Note June 2022

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal

Introduction to Repurposed Cities

City Living

This brief chapter introduces the notion of a repurposed city. A repurposed city is one that was ... more This brief chapter introduces the notion of a repurposed city. A repurposed city is one that was built to support one spatial order with specific economic, social, and political relations, but in which that spatial order has now collapsed, so that the city has to accommodate radically new uses, users, and purposes. In turn, residents have to find ways of using and adapting a material city built for something quite different. In repurposed cities, new dwellers must find ways of tinkering with urban spaces and reinvesting them with new meanings in order to use them in new ways. Their uses are constrained by the material forms of the past order, while conversely, they creatively remake those forms.

Inhabiting Space

City Living

This chapter develops a philosophical picture of spatially embedded agency and perception, and ar... more This chapter develops a philosophical picture of spatially embedded agency and perception, and argues that spaces and their dwellers mutually constitute one another. It lays out a philosophical framework and builds a philosophical toolbox for exploring cities and city living. It defends the strong philosophical claim that as spaces and dwellers make one another, they also generate ecological ontologies. In an ecological ontology, the kinds of real things that populate a particular environment are, in the most literal sense, to some extent constituted by the interactions between dwellers situated within that environment and between dwellers and their environment. The chapter ends by considering what makes a space ‘alive’ or ‘dead.’

The Epistemology of Maps

Maps provide us with an easily recognizable version of the new demarcation problem: On the one ha... more Maps provide us with an easily recognizable version of the new demarcation problem: On the one hand, we are all familiar with graphics and maps that unacceptably distort our perceptions without being technically inaccurate or fictive; indeed there are whole websites groups devoted to curating such images for fun. On the other hand, there are multiple unavoidably value-laden choices that must be made in the production of any map. Producing a map requires choosing everything from the colors and thicknesses of the lines, the scale, the projection system, the categories and parameters represented, and much more. There is no neutral default for any of these choices, and all of them shape what information the map communicates. All the visual choices involved in producing a map enable some information to be conveyed at the cost of hiding or distorting other information, as map makers themselves routinely acknowledge and discuss. Hence there are no straightforward answers to questions about...

What Counts as a Disease, and Why Does It Matter? in advance

The Journal of Philosophy of Disability

Editor’s Note, December 2021

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2021

[...]in “The Epistemic Duties of Philosophers: An Addendum,” van Basshuysen and White wrap up the... more [...]in “The Epistemic Duties of Philosophers: An Addendum,” van Basshuysen and White wrap up the exchange by clarifying that they are not defending lockdowns and acknowledging the enormous harm that lockdowns have wrought. The quest for epistemically warranted policy responses to the pandemic is an especially pressing one, as COVID refuses to be tamed, and we all are participating in a real-time, world-wide social experiment to figure out what we should do about it. Since cures for COVID are still lacking, our responses to the pandemic have been social interventions. Even the vaccination campaign has turned out to be a complex social intervention. [...]reflection on the social values that shape our assessment of different courses of intervention is crucial.

Urban Space and City Living

City Living, 2021

This chapter offers a philosophical account of what is distinctive about urban spaces and urban s... more This chapter offers a philosophical account of what is distinctive about urban spaces and urban subjectivity. It proposes four features distinctive of city life that concern dwellers’ bodies and how they use and move through space: (1) proximity and shared space with many people, including a wide and diverse range of strangers; (2) unpredictability; and (3) slow locomotion combined with (4) fast switching between skills, stances, and perceptual expectations, which requires a wide, fluid, and flexible set of metaskills for moving between skill sets. Drawing on empirical sociological literature, the chapter explores how city dwellers see and judge risk and safety, order and disorder. It also develops the notion of an urban territory, and explores how territory is claimed, used, and bounded through bodily micronegotiations.

City Living

Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 12, 2021

This book is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and... more This book is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. It is the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. It draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of city living. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through a detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, the book makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book ends with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

Medicalization, “Normal Function,” and the Definition of Health

Repurposed Spaces in Berlin and Johannesburg

A surprisingly large number of people, spanning three continents, ended up helping with this rese... more A surprisingly large number of people, spanning three continents, ended up helping with this research project in ways that turned out to be completely essential. I wish to thank my advisor, Marianna Pavlovskaya, for taking on such a quirky project and advisee; for being so supportive and insightful in her advice; for letting me work independently when I wanted to; and, most of all, for doing more than anyone else to help me make the paradigm shift from thinking like a philosopher to thinking like a geographer, or at least a philosopher-geographer. Her intellectual example and mentorship have been invaluable gifts. I am incredibly grateful to several exceptionally educated, knowledgeable, and committed tour guides, archivists, and other residents with special geographic knowledge in Berlin and in Johannesburg, who got excited about my project and ended up helping me with my research in ways that went far beyond their job descriptions. With their help, I found and accessed spaces I never would have otherwise known about; made invaluable connections; and got a deep and rich feel for the cities. These were people who love and understand their cities, and were willing and able to share that love and understanding; their generosity and knowledgeability was remarkable. I owe special thanks to Maria Klechevskaya of Berlin, who ended up redirecting my approach to finding research sites. Julia Dilger, the archivist at the Neukölln Museum, spent an entire day helping me find treasures in her collection. I am especially honored and grateful that the residents of Køpi 137 decided to allow me to do research and take photographs in their home, despite their commitment to privacy. In particular, I thank Køpi spokespeople Frank and Gabby for their generosity in showing me around the hauseprojekt and talking to me in depth about its history, values, and norms.

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Philosophy, Comedy, and the Need for Good Material

The “Natural Look”: Extreme Makeovers and the Limits of Self-Fashioning

In this chapter we treat Extreme Makeover as an exemplary text for the purpose of critically exam... more

Healthism, Elite Capture, and the Pitfalls of an Expansive Concept of Health

A Pragmatic Approach to Conceptualization of Health and Disease, 2024

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EPISTEMIC DIVERSITY, IGNORANCE, AND NON-IDEAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF NON-IDEAL THEORY, 2024

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The Pragmatics of Technologically Mediated Online Speech: “Don’t @ Me!”

The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language, 2024

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Uptake and refusal

Inquiry, 2023

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The Ethics of Retraction

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Public artifacts and the epistemology of collective material testimony

Philosophical Issues

Knowing things and going places

European Journal of Philosophy, May 5, 2022

The Repurposed City of Berlin

City Living

Editor's Note June 2022

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal

Introduction to Repurposed Cities

City Living

Inhabiting Space

City Living

The Epistemology of Maps

What Counts as a Disease, and Why Does It Matter? in advance

The Journal of Philosophy of Disability

Editor’s Note, December 2021

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2021

Urban Space and City Living

City Living, 2021

City Living

Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 12, 2021

Medicalization, “Normal Function,” and the Definition of Health

Repurposed Spaces in Berlin and Johannesburg

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Philosophy, Comedy, and the Need for Good Material

The “Natural Look”: Extreme Makeovers and the Limits of Self-Fashioning

In this chapter we treat Extreme Makeover as an exemplary text for the purpose of critically exam... more

Maps and the Epistemic Risks of Visual Representation

Journal of Language, Mind, and the Arts, 2024

Maps present distinctive epistemic risks. No set of representational conventions or epistemic sta... more Maps present distinctive epistemic risks. No set of representational conventions or epistemic standards can eliminate these risks. There is no such thing as an objective or value-free map; rather, the production of any map is governed by a variety of value-driven choices. While the value-ladenness of scientific reasoning is familiar to philosophers of science from the literature on inductive risk, visual representations of data such as maps pose epistemic risks that are distinct from (but just as ineliminable as) inductive risks. Three of these are aesthetic risk, categorization risk, and simplification risk. With respect to each, maps that are accurate according to recognizable representational conventions not only fail to avoid these risks but may even present heightened risk. Unconventional maps that make their distinctive, value-laden perspective clear may offer special epistemic benefits.

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Epistemic Diversity, Ignorance, and Nonideal Philosophy of Science

Routledge Handbook in Nonideal Epistemology, 2025

It has been a largely unquestioned assumption in the philosophy of science, even among those who ... more It has been a largely unquestioned assumption in the philosophy of science, even among those who are interested in the essential role of values and standpoints in science, that knowledge is the epistemic attitude that scientists primarily strive to attain. In contrast, I argue that scientific practices aim at managing, producing, communicating, and transmitting a diverse range of epistemic attitudes, including not only knowledge, but also ignorance, curiosity, suspicion, provisional acceptance, uncertainty, doubt, concern, attention, and more. Scientific practice often aims at unsettling our epistemic security rather than settling or enhancing it, or at redirecting our attention rather than offering a secure piece of knowledge. My claim is not just that scientists often have and articulate these various epistemic attitudes along the way in their march towards knowledge, but that having and transmitting such attitudes is often the goal of scientific practice. Scientists do not just pursue knowledge; they do things like try to undercut one another’s certainty; build openings for future research programs; debunk methodologies; recruit more researchers to their programs; and so on. Scientists are ineliminably embedded in social contexts and power relations and situated within epistemic perspectives, and these concrete situations shape not just what they can know, as standpoint theorists have emphasized, but what epistemic attitudes and goals it makes sense for them to value and pursue. It is artificial, I will try to show, to see all this activity as ultimately organized by a pure quest for knowledge.

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Sexual Ethics for Virtual Cyborgs

Arse Elektronika zine, 2023

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"Don't @ Me!": The Pragmatics of Online Speech Acts

Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language, 2023

interrogatives, promises, imperatives, and so forth-are medium independent; they can be performed... more interrogatives, promises, imperatives, and so forth-are medium independent; they can be performed with one's voice, in writing, over electronic media, in sign language, etc. When speech acts are medium-independent in this way, we can often establish that we are performing them (assuming we have the proper authority and felicity conditions) just by using words to announce that we are doing so. We can say, "I am ordering you to close the door," or "I am asking you whether you are coming tonight" and thereby determine that the speech act is an order or an interrogative. We can use explicit language to differentiate between hard to separate speech act types: For instance, I might say, "Will you talk through this paper with me tonight? I am just asking as a favor, not demanding that you do it." In these cases, the words used lock down which speech act it is. But other speech acts are dependent for their performance on the materiality of how they are performed. I cannot prescribe a drug just by saying drug quantities, even if I add, "I am prescribing"-I have to write it on the right kind of official paper or form, for example. 1 Online speech act types of the kind I care about here are materially differentiated and medium-dependent, as we will see. No grammar or explicit description will make them be the speech act they are-they need to be performed with the right material technology. 2. A Framework for Analyzing the Pragmatics of Speech Acts Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein and Austin (among others) transformed the philosophy of language by teaching us that we do more with speech than simply transfer information. Speaking is an action, and through the act of speaking we structure the social world in a variety of concrete ways by shifting norms. We can command, invite, entreat, persuade, arrest, sentence, call to order, warn; these actions are accomplished in the act of speaking. Speech can perform such social transformations only when a speech act is felicitousthat is, it is performed in the right context, following appropriate conventions, and the speaker has the proper authority to perform it. A professor can felicitously command a student to turn in their assigned paper. This is so because of the norms that govern the context of a university classroom, and the professor's position as an authoritative

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Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions

Ergo, 2022

What are we doing when we ascribe gender -that is, when we announce, "I am a man"; tell someone, ... more What are we doing when we ascribe gender -that is, when we announce, "I am a man"; tell someone, "You are not a woman," or use gendered pronouns to describe someone, for instance? And why does such gendered language matter? Why should people care what pronouns are used to refer to them? In this paper, we give a pragmatic analysis of the structure of gender ascriptions. We argue that gender ascriptions do not function first and foremost as truth claims, but rather serve a different primary pragmatic function. We try to show why gender ascriptions, including pronoun uses, are ethically important, including why it is harmful to ascribe to someone a gender that they reject. Our more specific goal is to understand why gender ascriptions matter by understanding how they function at the level of linguistic pragmatics. There are two seemingly straightforward answers to the question, why do gender ascriptions matter?

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Knowing Things and Going Places

European Journal of Philosophy, 2022

When I say "I know Sarah", or "I know Berlin", what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowled... more When I say "I know Sarah", or "I know Berlin", what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place, as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or 'objectual knowledge' as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological sort. It is a genre of inherently first-personal aesthetic knowledge, but it is also, like know-how, an active skill. I end by exploring a couple of classic problems in aesthetic epistemology, applied to the case of knowledge-of as active aesthetic knowledge.

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Sexual violation and the language of repair

by Quill Kukla, Cassie Herbert, and Ari Watson

repair into three stages. First, we introduce a new category of performative speech acts, "repara... more repair into three stages. First, we introduce a new category of performative speech acts, "reparatives," which, like other categories such as imperatives, exercitives, interrogatives, and so forth, have a distinctive shared pragmatic structure and force. These speech acts do not in fact directly perform repair, except sometimes as a contingent perlocutionary effect. Rather, we argue, they open space for repair work, including enabling the possibility of speech acts that directly repair. Second, we turn to speech acts that can have repairing effects as part of their pragmatic force. Third and finally, we consider a category of truth-telling and evidenceestablishing speech acts which, we argue, turn out to lay the groundwork for the possibility of reparatives. Before reparatives can open up possibilities for repair, a shared and accurate understanding of the wrongs and harms that occurred has to be established. We explore #MeToo declarations as especially powerful and important speech acts that play this role. Thus, to summarize, we begin with reparatives, which enable repair, and then move forward to the speech acts that are enabled by reparatives and directly perform repair, and then backwards to the speech acts that stabilize a shared reality in order to make repairing speech possible. Along the way, we will also consider degenerate approaches to repair, which block repairing language.

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A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent

Most of the literature on sexual consent presupposes that consent requires autonomy, and proceeds... more Most of the literature on sexual consent presupposes that consent requires autonomy, and proceeds as though autonomy is a roughly digital property: you either have it or
you don’t, and if you don’t have it then you can’t legitimately consent to sexual activity. But in fact, autonomy is a continuum, and our autonomy is almost always partial. Our
autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full
autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. Accepting this consequent would either make the notion of consent useless, or it would turn most sex
into rape, and neither is a helpful outcome. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but non-ideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more.

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Philosophy, Comedy, and the Need for Good Material

Women on the Nature of Philosophy, Ed. Elly Vintiadis, Routledge, 2020

Giving a precise definition of philosophy seems impossible. Rather than having a canonical set of... more Giving a precise definition of philosophy seems impossible. Rather than having a canonical set of methods, our discipline draws upon a range of different and loosely grouped methods, which sometimes overlap with those of other disciplines, and which go in and out of favor across time and context. It avails itself of a loose and gigantic set of texts, with no real rules about which are useful for which purposes. Unlike most scientific fields, there is nothing resembling any consensus about the state of our knowledge; philosophers radically disagree even about the most basic questions in our field, such as how many kinds of substance there are, what morality is, whether there is free will, or whether we can know anything. Indeed, we often don't even agree about what counts as a philosophical question in the first place.1 Perhaps more damning, philosophy, unlike any other scholarly discipline, literally has no topic or subject matter. One can philosophize about absolutely anything, from the nature of the will to what makes art beautiful, from the ethics of having children to the politics of civil disobedience to the formal structure of indexical sentences, and anything in between or outside of these. How can we possibly define a discipline that can be about absolutely anything and is beholden to nothing? I used to say that we know philosophy when we see it, but I am increasingly certain that this isn't so. I now think that our intuitions about what 'counts as' philosophy are so deeply marked by the distortions and limitations of our training, identity, social position, and region as to be worse than useless-they tell us nothing concrete but instead tend to reinforce existing power structures. These intuitions are typically about what 'feels like philosophy' to those in control of the profession, but with no standards or tests for checking these intuitions, they generally end up recreating biases, and shutting out the insights and perspectives of different kinds of people who may have different intuitions.

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Taking children's autonomy seriously as a parent

APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, 2020

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Situated Knowledge, Purity, and Moral Panic

1 The term 'moral panic' is generally attributed to Stanley Cohen, from his classic 1973 work, Fo... more 1 The term 'moral panic' is generally attributed to Stanley Cohen, from his classic 1973 work, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Routledge). A moral panic is a broadly distributed social phenomenon, wherein a specific source of purported risk comes to be seen as a severe threat to our basic social order and security. Moral panics are characterized by simplistic causal stories, risk distortion, and a moralistic, characterological condemnations of groups.

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Rebecca Kukla Interview

by Clifford Sosis and Quill Kukla

In this interview Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar in the Kenne... more In this interview Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, talks about traveling the world with her nomadic parents, her father who was a holocaust survivor and philosopher, hearing the Dream argument in lieu of bedtime stories, chaotic exposure to religion, getting a job at and apartment at the age of 14, the queerness of Toronto, meeting John Waters and Cronenberg, her brother who is the world’s first openly transgender ordained rabbi, getting into ballet, combating an eating disorder, the importance of chosen family, co-authoring an article with her dad, developing an interest in philosophy of mathematics, the affordability of college in Canada, taking care of a disabled, dramatically uninsured loved one, going to University of Pitt for grad school, dealing with aggravated depression, working with Brandom, McDowell, the continental/analytic distinction, history of philosophy, how feminism and women—such as Tamara Horowitz, Annette Baier, and Jennifer Whiting--were treated at Pitt, coping with harassment from a member of the department, impostor syndrome, Dan Dennett and ‘freeedom’, her sweet first gig (in Vermont), dining with Bernie Sanders, spending a bad couple of years in Oregon, having a child, September 11th, securing tenure and becoming discontent at Carleton University, toying with the idea of becoming a wine importer, taking a sabbatical at Georgetown University which rekindled her love of philosophy, working on the pragmatics of language with Mark Lance, Mass Hysteria and the culture of pregnancy, how parenting informs her philosophy, moving to South Florida and the quirkiness of Tampa, getting an MA in Geography, science, philosophy and urban spaces, boxing, starting a group for people pursuing non-monogamous relationships, developing a course on Bojack Horseman, her current beau, Die Antwoord, Kendrick, Trump, and what she would do if she were queen of the world…

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Quill Kukla

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