Courses Taught
Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art & Beauty (University of the Incarnate Word)
This course is designed to introduce students to the philosophical issues and questions surrounding the philosophy of art and beauty. Our course will explore how different philosophers from a variety of cultural traditions consider major themes in philosophical aesthetics. Our course will be focused on the themes of performance, play, picture, and place. Through these themes, students will become familiar with classical topics in aesthetics such as the nature of beauty, the importance of aesthetic play, and the role of art in society. Students will also explore more recent concerns in philosophical aesthetics, such as the aesthetic value of games, the relationship between the pictorial arts and perception, and the possibility of locating aesthetic experience in everyday life. By the end of this course, students will be able to draw on a variety of aesthetic theories to conceptualize their own relation to art and aesthetic experience. Students engaged in the arts and related disciplines will, likewise, be armed with a rich philosophical vocabulary to articulate their aesthetic practices.
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Current Continental Philosophy (Texas A&M University)
This course is concerned with the relationship between human consciousness and experience. Current continental philosophy elaborates this concern from various perspectives. In this course, we will survey the most important movements on and developments of such a topic. To this end, we will read from phenomenology (and its close relatives hermeneutics and existentialism), critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, psychoanalytic theory, postmodernism, gender theory, and postcolonial studies. We will discuss themes including the role of language in shaping experience, the role of tradition in the formation of knowledge, critical movements against such traditional knowledge, recent developments in gender performativity, and the possibility of community. We will read philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacque Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Jean-François Lyotard, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Students will leave this course with an advanced understanding of twentieth and twenty-first century continental philosophy.
Introduction to Philosophy (Texas A&M University)
This course will introduce students to perennial philosophical questions. Students will become familiar with many of philosophy’s basic set of problems such as the nature of reality, what constitutes knowledge, the existence of God, measuring the good life, and the possibility of human freedom. We will focus especially on metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, ethics, and political philosophy. Students will learn to apply philosophical ideas to important and pressing contemporary questions. This course is structured by three modules: “ancient,” “medieval to early modern,” and “modern to contemporary” philosophy. Our course will identify what makes the philosophical thinking in each period unique.
Ethics of Engineering (Texas A&M University: co-taught)
Development of techniques of moral analysis and their application to ethical problems encountered by engineers, such as professional employee rights and whistle blowing; environmental issues; ethical aspects of safety, risk and liability, and public welfare; conflicts of interest; emphasis on developing the capacity for independent ethical analysis of real and hypothetical cases.