Department of Philosophy

     Faculty Members

          Kelly Becker

          Andrew Burgess

          John Bussanich

          Mary Domski

          Russell Goodman

          Barbara Hannan

          Richard Hayes

          Adrian Johnston

          Brent Kalar

          John Taber

          Iain Thomson

Home | Faculty | Courses | Program | Announcements


 

Kelly Becker, Associate Professor

  • B.S. (University of Minnesota, '88)
  • B.A. (University of Pittsburgh, '91)
  • Ph.D. (UC, San Diego, '99)

Epistemology, Philosophy of Language and Mind, Quine.

Has recently published papers in Journal of Philosophy, Erkenntinis, History of Philosophy Quarterly, American Philosophical Quarterly (July, 2002 and January, 2004), Dialectica, Metaphilosophy and Philosophical Studies.

Prof. Becker's book, Epistemology Modalized, which includes critical discussions of extant versions of modal epistemologies and a defense of the thesis that knowledge is reliably formed, sensitive true belief, was published by Routledge in 2007.


 

Andrew Burgess, Professor

  • B.A. (St. Olaf '58)
  • Ph.D. (Yale '69)

Philosophy of Religion and Modern Christian Thought, Kierkegaard.

Has published in Religious Studies, International Journal For Philosophy of Religion, Kierkegaard-Studiet, Christian Century, Journal of Religious Studies, and the International Kierkegaard Commentary. Author of Passion, "Knowing How" and Understanding: An Essay on the Concept of Faith, (Scholars Press, 1975). "Forstand in the Swenson-Lowrie Correspondence and in the 'Metaphysical Caprice'," in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus. Volume 7 of International Kierkegaard Commentary. Ed., Robert L. Perkins. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994, pp. 109-28. "Kierkegaard on Homiletics and the Genre of the Sermon," in The Journal of Communication and Religion, volume 17 (September 1994), pp. 17-31.


 

John Bussanich, Professor and Graduate Director

  • B.A. (Stanford '72)
  • Ph.D. (Stanford '82)

Greek Philosophy, Comparative Philosophy & Mysticism (ancient western and Indian traditions).

He is the author of The One and its Relation to Intellect in Plotinus: A Commentary on Selected Texts, (Brill 1988) "Plotinus' Metaphysics of the One," pp. 38-65, in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus; and a series of articles on Neoplatonic mysticism. He is currently working on a selection of primary texts in translation with commentary: Neoplatonic Mysticism in Late Antiquity in the Classics of Western Spirituality Series, forthcoming from Paulist Press; "The Religion of Socrates" (2006) in The Blackwell Companion to Socrates. He is the co-editor of the journal Ancient Philosophy.

 


 

Mary Domski, Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor

  • B.A. (University of Pennsylvania '97)
  • M.S.Ed. (University of Pennsylvania '98)
  • M.A. (University of Leeds '99)
  • Ph.D. (Indiana University '03)

History of Modern Philosophy, Newtonian Science and the Scientific Revolution, Kant, History and Philosophy of Science (especially during the seventeenth century).

Prof. Domski is a co-editor (with Michael Dickson) of Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science (Open Court, forthcoming), a collection of essays in honor of Michael Friedman's work in the history and philosophy of science. She is the author of papers on Newton's philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of experiment, Locke's account of geometrical reasoning, and Kant's notions of infinity and unity. Her papers and reviews have appeared (or will soon appear) in Early Science and Medicine, Locke Studies, Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the Tenth International Kant Congress, and Physics in Perspective.

Prof. Domski's research is currently focused on the interplay between the natural sciences and philosophy during the early modern period. She also has a growing interest in the relationship between history and philosophy.

Recently, some of her time has also been spent working as the Principal Investigator on the NSF-sponsored Ethics Fellows Pilot Program. The program's website is located at: www.unm.edu/~ethicfel.

Professor Domski's homepage


 

Russell Goodman, Regents Professor

  • B.A. (Univ. of Pennsylvania '66)
  • M.A. (Oxford '70)
  • Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins '71)

Wittgenstein, American Philosophy, Aesthetics.

Author of American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition, (Cambridge, 1990). Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader , (Routledge, 1995) Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge, 2002), Contending with Stanley Cavell, (Oxford, 2005), Pragmatism: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 4 vols. (Routledge, 2005). Publications in History of Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophy East and West, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Emerson Society Quarterly, Metaphilosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy. Journal of the History of Ideas. Contributor to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James) and to volumes on Neoplatonism, American and European National Identity, and Wittgenstein.

Project Director for Pragmatism: A living Tradition, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, to be held in Albuquerque in 2007. Prof. Goodman previously directed an NEH Seminar and Institute on Ralph Waldo Emerson in 2003 and 2005.

Professor Goodman's Homepage


 

Barbara Hannan, Associate Professor

  • B.A. (Randolph-Macon Woman's College, '79)
  • J.D. (University of Arizona, '82)
  • Ph.D. (University of Arizona, '89)

Major research areas: philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology, metaphysics. Other areas of competence: philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of law, first-order logic.

Author of The Riddle of the World: A Reconsideration of Schopenhauer's Philosophy, forthcoming, Oxford University Press.

Author of Subjectivity And Reduction: An Introduction to the Mind-Body Problem (Westview Press, 1994). Contributor to Love Analyzed (Westviow Press, 1997).

Recent Articles/Critical Notices/Reviews in International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Mind, and Ancient Philosophy.

Retrieve Prof. Hannan's Personal Profile.

Access Prof. Hannan's Syllabus for Philosophy of Law and Morals.

Access Prof. Hannan's Syllabus for Philosophy of Science.

 


 

Richard Hayes, Associate Professor

  • B.A. (Carelton University '72)
  • M.A. (Toronto '74)
  • Ph.D. (Toronto '82)

History of Indian Buddhist scholasticism in the context of Indian philosophy; Buddhist logic and epistemology; History of metaphysics in India; Buddhist psychology and Jungian analytic psychology; Sanskrit grammar and Indian philosophies of language.

Author of Dignaga on the interpretation of signs. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988; and Land of No Buddha: Reflections of a Sceptical Buddhist. Birmingham: Windhorse Publications, 1998.

Subject editor of Buddhist Philosophy section of Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, second edition. Subject editor of Indian Buddhism section of Curzon-Routledge Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Subject editor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy section of Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Articles published in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Journal of the American Academy of Religions, and Tetsugaku.

Professor Hayes's Homepage


 

Adrian Johnston, Assistant Professor

  • B.A. (University of Texas at Austin, 1996)
  • Ph.D. (State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2001)

Major areas of research interest: Nineteenth and twentieth-century European philosophy (particularly German idealism and post-war French thought) and psychoanalysis (especially Freud and Lacan).

Professor Johnston is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Northwestern University Press, 2005). He also has a new forthcoming book entitled Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Northwestern University Press, 2007); a modified extract from this new book recently appeared as an essay entitled "Ghosts of Substance Past: Schelling, Lacan, and the Denaturalization of Nature" in the Žižek-edited collection Lacan: The Silent Partners (Verso, 2006). He is also presently revising for publication two completed manuscripts: one on the implications of the psychoanalytic concept of drive for philosophical notions of human freedom (tentatively entitled Freedom from Nature: Drive between Heteronomy and Autonomy) and the other on contemporary philosophical models of political change (tentatively entitled The Cadence of Change: Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformations). Additionally, he is co-editing and contributing to a volume-in-process on Lacan’s dual theoretical and clinical approaches to the psychoses. In the near future, Professor Johnston plans to begin work on two other projects: first, a book addressing contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou’s relationship with Lacanian theory, and, second, a study examining the controversial topic of unconscious affects, an examination to be situated at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science.

Professor Johnston has published in such journals as American Imago, Anamorphosis, Clinical Studies: International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Continental Philosophy Review, Filozofski Vestnik, Idealistic Studies, Journal for Lacanian Studies, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, Lacanian Ink, The Letter: Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, Owl of Minerva, Philosophy Today, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Problemi, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Psychoanalytic Studies, Re-turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, Theory and Event, and Theory and Psychology.


 

Brent Kalar, Assistant Professor

  • B.A. (University of Minnesota, '93)
  • Ph.D. (Harvard, '03)

Interests: German Philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche, Aesthetics, and Ethics.

Professor Kalar is the author of The Demands of Taste in Kant's Aesthetics (Continuum, 2006).

He is presently working on two related projects. The first is a series of papers, and eventually a monograph, exploring the aestheticist and perfectionist strains in the thought of the early Nietzsche and their sources in Kant, Schiller, Early German Romanticism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kalar hopes to eventually use this research as the basis for a systematic study of what Stanley Cavell calls "moral perfectionism" -- what Kalar would instead call "romantic perfectionism." He believes that romantic perfectionism represents a viable ethical tradition, related to so-called "virtue ethics," that deserves more attention from mainstream ethical theorists. The second project is a series of papers, and eventually a monograph, reconstructing Kant's aesthetics from the perspective of practical criticism. Much work has been done on Kant's aesthetics in recent decades, but the relevance of his aesthetics to critical writing on art and beauty has never been systematically explored. There is, nonetheless, evidence that Kant thought about this connection, and considered it pertinent to understanding his "critique of taste." Kalar would like to make the connection and its pertinence explicit, as well as usable for art critics concerned with the nature of beauty. Individuals interested in how the two projects described above are related are welcome to contact Professor Kalar.


 

John Taber, Professor and Chair

  • B.A. (Kansas, '71)
  • Ph.D. (Hamburg, '79)

Classical Indian Philosophy, 19th Century German Philosophy.

Has published in The Journal of Indian Philosophy, Philosophy East and West, Kantstudien, Journal of the American Oriental Society, and other journals. Author of Transformative Philosophy: A Study of Sankara, Fichte, and Heidegger, (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1983) and A Hindu Critique of Buddhist Epistemology: Kumarila on Perception (Routledge, 2005). Articles on Indian Philosophy in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1995.


 

Iain Thomson, Associate Professor

  • B.A. (UC Berkeley, '91)
  • M.A. (UC San Diego, '94)
  • Graduate Work (UC Irvine, '94)
  • Ph.D. (UC San Diego, '99)

Continental philosophy since Kant (esp. 19th and 20th century).

Publications include: "Can I Die? Derrida on Heidegger on Death," Philosophy Today 43:1 (1999), 29-42; "From the Question Concerning Technology to the Quest for a Democratic Technology: Heidegger, Marcuse, Feenberg," Inquiry 43:2 (2000), 203-16; "Ontotheology? Understanding Heidegger's Destruktion of Metaphysics," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 8:3 (2000), 297-327; "What's Wrong with Technological Essentialism? A Response to Feenberg," Inquiry 43:4 (2000), 429-44; "Heidegger on Ontological Education, or: How We Become What We Are," Inquiry 44:3 (2001), 243-68; "The Philosophical Fugue: Understanding the Structure and Goal of Heidegger's Beiträge," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 34:1 (2003), 57-73; "Interpretation as Self-Creation: Nietzsche on the Pre-Platonics," Ancient Philosophy 23:1 (2003), pp. 195-213; "Heidegger and the Politics of the University," Journal of the History of Philosophy 41:4 (2003), pp. 515-542; "Ontology and Ethics at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy," Inquiry 47:4 (2004), pp. 380-412; “Heidegger and National Socialism,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, eds, A Companion to Heidegger (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 32-48; “Deconstructing the Hero,” in Jeff McLaughlin, ed., Comics as Philosophy (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming); "Heidegger's Perfectionist Philosophy of Eduation in Being and Time," forthcoming in Continental Philosophy Review 37:4 (2004); “Phenomenology and Environmental Philosophy,” chapter in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, eds, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming 2006).

For electronic offprints of some of these publications (which can be read/printed with Adobe Acrobat), please visit Professor Thomson's Homepage. For offprints of his other articles, please e-mail Professor Thomson directly.

His book, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education, from Cambridge University Press, can be ordered from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.


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