Faculty & Staff Directory

Education

• Ph.D., Philosophy, Boston College, 1997
• B.A., Philosophy, Georgetown University, 1984

 Courses Taught

• Ethics and Public Policy (PPOL 512)
• Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 100)
• S/T: Philosophy of Sex & Love (PHIL 375)

Accomplishments

Thanks to the Provost's nomination, this summer from July 25-29, I had the opportunity to attend a remarkable five day intensive seminar at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in DC, funded by the Council for Independent Colleges.  The topic was The Ancient Greek Hero, and we read Greg Nagy's book, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, which he uses for a gen ed course at Harvard.  He also runs it as a large open enrollment MOOC course every year.  The book is a fantastic account about how myth and ritual intersect.  In this condensed version of the course we read Homer's Odyssey, selections from the Illiad, Aeschylus' Orestaia Trilogy and Plato's Apology and Phaedo.  We traced the influence of greek hero cults and ritual ancestor worship in each of these texts.  The experience gave me a new insight into material I have taught for years.  Nagy's approach was a really interesting blend of classical philology, literary criticism and anthropology.  All the translations of these works we used in the Seminar are freely available online through the Center for Hellenic Studies, and I am using some of them in my Introduction to Philosophy course this fall.

Activities

• In addition to his normal faculty committee work on the Academic Freedom and Grievance committee, and various faculty committees in Public Policy, he is serving on the Provost's search committee, the Spanish search committee and the University's Student success committee
• He is moderating a Philosophy Slam in the River House on October 15, 2019 on the question, "Is Capitalism Compatible with Democracy?" and he is appearing as Friar Laurance in the JU Theater department's proeduction of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Selected Publications, Awards, and Service

• He has published a number of articles exploring Lacan's relation to the Philosophical Tradition ranging from his appeal to the predicate calculus in his account of sexual difference to work on Plato, Lacan, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, and Sartre.
• His work has appeared in the Florida Philosophical Review, The Journal for Lacanian Studies, Clinical Studies, Atenea, Film and Philosophy, Literature and Psychology, and Interdisciplinary Humanities.
• While his specialization is in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, he has also published on ethics, psychoanalysis, Plato and political philosophy
• His recent work is on Plato's influence on Shakespeare's Hamlet, and he is currently working on a book on Plato and Shakespeare