The UNM Philosophy Department will feature discussions by Hubert Dreyfus, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Thursday and Friday at 3:30 p.m. in Anthropology Room 163.
Dreyfus will present "Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age: Kierkegaard on the Dangers of the Internet," Thursday, and "What Could be More Intelligible Than Everyday Intelligibility?: Reinterpreting Division I of Being and Time in the Light of Division II" Friday.
Dreyfus, whose interests include existentialism, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of literature and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, has written more than 120 articles and five books. His latest book, "On The Internet," combines and extends his previous work on the philosophical implications of technology, which he will discuss in Thursday's lecture. Dreyfus also is working on a revised, second edition of "Being-in-the-World," and he will present a portion of this work in Friday's lecture.
Dreyfus has won several National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation grants, a Fulbright, a Guggenheim Fellow and is a Phi Beta Kappa Lecturer. He also has an honorary doctorate from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Holland. He was recently inducted to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is a recipient of the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching at Berkeley, where he is a professor in the graduate school of philosophy.
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Arsalan Razani, UNM professor of mechanical engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering International. The society is a nonprofit educational and technical organization with an international membership of 125,000. Only 2 percent of its members are elected as fellows.
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Razani has conducted research on modeling and optimization of hydride heat pumps. He has worked with Sandia National Laboratories on various projects during the past five years.
Razani also has published two books and 100 articles in the areas of thermal science and engineering, radiation transport, energy conversion and utilization. Razani has twice received the School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award at UNM.
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Gregory Gleason, a UNM associate political science professor, has been elected president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, the world's largest scholarly society focused on Central Asia, the Middle East and Eurasia.
The Central Eurasian Studies Society, housed at Harvard University, is a private, nonprofit organization of scholars interested in the study of the area's history, languages, cultures, modern states and societies. The Central Eurasian region includes Turkish, Mongolian, Iranian, Caucasian, Tibetan and other populations.
This is Gleason's first appointment as a Central Eurasian Studies Society officer. He will have the position for three years. The purpose is to promote high standards of research and teaching, as well as foster communication among scholars through meetings and publications. The society facilitates interaction among senior scholars, junior scholars, graduate students and independent scholars in North America and throughout the world.
"One of my most important goals will be to raise the appreciation within academia of foreign area studies, particularly in the severely under-studied and widely misunderstood Eurasian region of the world," Gleason said in a University statement.
He specializes in public sector modernization in the former communist world. During the past decade, he has worked in governance and public sector reform programs sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Asian Development Bank and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He teaches courses at UNM in international development, transnational processes and inter-state relations.
