How to write your Philosophy Paper

How to read Philosophy

Philosophy Department

Welcome to my web site. I am a Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston, where I’ve been since 1981. I earned my B.A. in Philosophy at Denison University (1968) and my M.A. and Ph.D., also in Philosophy, at the University of Western Ontario (1969 and 1973). I taught at Miami University from 1972 until 1981. I was Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the College of Charleston from 1991 to 2000 and Speaker of the Faculty, 2001-2004. I have also served twice as Interim Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, in 1996 and 2006.

My research interests are in aesthetics and philosophy of mind. In one line of work, I am interested in areas where the two overlap. For example, what do you see when you look at Malevich’s The Red House? Do you somehow see both the surface of the painting (the colored geometrical shapes) and the red house, simultaneously? Or do you see just the surface of the painting and imagine the house? How are imagination and perception intertwined in our experiences of art? In a second line of work, I am interested in cognitive ethology, the study of animal minds. Why have philosophers so often denied the existence of (non-human) animal minds? What are the prospects for human understanding of (any) non-human minds?

I am the co-editor of Language in Primates (Springer Verlag, 1983) and the author of articles in philosophy of language, epistemology, aesthetics and philosophy of mind. I have published in The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Metaphilosophy, Social Epistemology, Philosophy and Literature, and elsewhere.

I held a year-long fellowship in Philosophy at Princeton University awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976-77) and have been a participant in several NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes. I was a member of the 1985 School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University. I spent sabbatical years at the University of Colorado, Boulder (1986-87) and the University of California, Davis (1997-98).

My wife Pana and I have two sons: Nick, founder of Webshots.com, the popular photo site, and Jason, Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton, now a professor of biology at Williams College. I am a competitive masters swimmer and currently hold world and national records in backstroke events.

June, 2007