Bruce Waller (1946-2023)
[from The Daily Nous Justin Weinberg February 13, 2023 at 7:07 am]
Professor Waller was known for his work on free will and moral responsibility, authoring books such as Freedom Without Responsibility, Against Moral Responsibility, The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility, The Injustice of Punishment, and Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and the Desire to Be a God, among others. You can learn more about his writings here and here.
Professor Waller taught at Youngstown State from 1990 until his retirement in 2019. He previously taught at Elon College (now Elon University). He earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1979.
Philosopher Gregg Caruso writes:
Bruce Waller was an innovative and inspiring philosopher who almost singlehandedly revitalized moral responsibility skepticism in the 1980s and 90s, making it a serious and attractive position for a whole new generation of philosophers. Not only did he present powerful arguments against the kind of moral responsibility needed to justify our desert-based attitudes, judgements, and treatments (such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, blame, and retributive punishment), he also developed a kind of error theory to diagnose our stubborn attachment to the moral responsibility system, which he argued is ultimately a harmful and dehumanizing set of practices and beliefs. Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Waller showed that by abandoning belief in moral responsibility and the notion of just deserts, we can look more clearly into the cause and more deeply into the systems that shape individuals and their behavior, and this will allow us to adopt more humane and effective practices and policies. Waller’s work will continue to inspire and challenge philosophers for generations to come.
He died on February 8th, 2023. There is an obituary here.
Dr. Michael Jerryson (1974-2021)
[from Justin Whitaker at Buddhist Door]
The widely renouned Buddhist scholar Michael Jerryson (1974–2021) passed away on 9 July at the age of 47, following a two-year battle against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). Jerryson was a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences—formerly the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies—at Youngstown State University and lived in nearby Howland Township, Ohio.
Jerryson received an undergraduate degree in Western philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1996 and then enlisted in the United States Peace Corps, serving as an English teacher in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. He went on to earn a master’s degree in Languages and Cultures of Asia from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2001 and a PhD in Religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008.
An expert on religion and violence, Jerryson authored and edited nine books on Buddhism, the religions of South and Southeast Asia, and comparative religion, and founded the Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence unit at the American Academy of Religion. He also served as a consultant for the Taiwan-based global Buddhist organization Fo Guang Shan.
Some of his most influential works include Buddhist Warfare (Oxford University Press 2010), co-edited by Mark Juergensmeyer; If You Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence (Oxford University Press 2018); and Buddhist-Muslim Relations in a Theravada World (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), co-edited by Iselin Frydenlund. He also co-edited Violence and the World’s Religious Traditions (Oxford University Press 2016) with Margo Kitts and Mark Juergensmeyer, and served as the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism (Oxford University Press 2016).
In May 2022, Equinox Publishing plans to release a special ebook titled Buddhist Violence and Religious Authority – A Tribute to the Work of Michael Jerryson, edited by Mark Juergensmeyer and Margo Kitts. As an introduction, the editors write:
Most recently in his critique of U Wirathu, the Burmese Buddhist monk whose advocacy of Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar has stirred a boiling pot of anti-Muslim resentments, Michael Jerryson has shown that reverence for Burmese religious authorities transcends respect for traditional Buddhist doctrine and monastic accomplishments. It emanates instead from the phenomenon of religious authority itself and from the cultural institutions which support it. His examinations have resulted in heightened sensitivity to the sociology of religious authority and violence. The scholarly contributions in this volume include discussions of Buddhism and violence, religious authority and nationalism, whether Buddhist, Christian, white, or other. (Equinox Publications)
[A local tribute to Dr. Jerryson can be found here]