Philosophy Department Faculty
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Edward AverillDr. Averill, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., M.S., University of California at Santa Barbara; B.A. Harvard), has been at Texas Tech since 1980. His areas of specialization are philosophical psychology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Professor Averill's publications include: "The Primary-Secondary Quality Distinction," Philosophical Review (1982), "Color and the Anthropocentric Problem," Journal of Philosophy (1985), "The Relational Nature of Color," Philosophical Review (1992), and "Towards a Projectivist Account of Color," Journal of Philosophy (2005).
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Howard CurzerDr. Curzer, Professor (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin; M.A., B.A. in Mathematics, Wesleyan University), taught at the University of Houston before coming to Texas Tech in 1985. His current areas of interest are ancient philosophy, virtue ethics, existentialism, and Confucian philosophy. His publications include a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics entitled, Aristotle and the Virtues (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), a textbook/anthology entitled, Ethical Theory and Moral Problems (Wadsworth Press, 1999), and various articles including: "An Aristotelian Account of Civility,” in Civility in Politics and Education, ed. by D. Mower and W. Robison (Routledge, 2012), “An Aristotelian Critique of the Traditional Family,” American Philosophical Quarterly, (2010), and “Spies and Lies: Faithful, Courageous Israelites and Truthful Spies,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, (2010). He is a co-recipient of a NSF grant to study and teach wildlife research ethics, and a recipient of a NEH grant to study and teach virtue ethics and Confucian philosophy.
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Jonathan DorseyDr. Dorsey, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of California, Davis; B.A. w/ distinction in philosophy, Ohio State), joined the department in 2011. He works in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, mainly on issues about consciousness, the physical, and the thesis of physicalism. He is also interested in the philosophical foundations of psychology and relations like supervenience, realization, and part-whole relations. His recent paper, “On the supposed limits of physicalist theories of mind”, appears in Philosophical Studies. |
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Francesca di PoppaDr. di Poppa, Associate Professor (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh; B.A., University of Pisa), is mainly interested in history of modern philosophy, in particular the causation debate and the development of modern notions of man and the world. She is also interested in ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle), Scholasticism and history of science. She is currently working on the notion of causation in Descartes and Spinoza.
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Christopher HomDr. Hom, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine LPS), joined the department in Fall 2007. His research is focused in philosophy of language and metaethics, in particular, issues surrounding expressive meaning and racial epithets. His work has appeared in Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy Compass and Philosophical Studies. He is currently working on a book about racial epithets, and will be on leave for 2011-12 as a faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.
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Daniel NathanDr. Nathan, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago; A.B., University of Michigan), writes and teaches in the areas in the areas of aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy of law. His work has appeared in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Erkenntnis, and Public Affairs Quarterly; his most recent papers include: "A Paradox in Intentionalism," British Journal of Aesthetics (2005) and "Art, Meaning, and Artist's Meaning," in Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Art (2006). Currently, he is working on problems of interpretation in legal philosophy and aesthetics.
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Anna Christina RibeiroDr. Ribeiro, Associate Professor (Ph.D., Maryland; M.A., B.Phil., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; B.A. Hunter College) joined Texas Tech in 2006. Her area of specialization is aesthetics, particularly the philosophies of literature and film. She has secondary interests in philosophy of psychology and linguistics. Ribeiro is the editor of The Continuum Companion to Aesthetics (Continuum Books, forthcoming) and the author of "Toward a Philosophy of Poetry" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2009) and "Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2007), among other publications. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty during 2009-10 to work on a manuscript entitled Poetry among the Arts, and was hosted by the Logos Research Group at the University of Barcelona Department of Philosophy during her research leave. |
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Walter SchallerDr. Schaller, Associate Professor (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison; M.A. in Political Science, University of California-Berkeley) taught previously at Wheaton (Mass.) College and the University of Kentucky. His primary interests are in political philosophy and ethics. Professor Schaller has published articles on Kant's ethics, utilitarianism, and the relationship between virtues and duties in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Ratio, Dialogue, and History of Philosophy Quarterly. His recent articles include: "Is Liberal Neutrality Insufficiently Egalitarian?," Journal of Philosophy (2004) and "Liberal Neutrality and Liberty of Conscience," Law and Philosophy (2005).
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Jeremy SchwartzDr. Schwartz, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, B.A., University of Chicago), started teaching at Texas Tech in the Spring of 2009. He works on Kant, moral philosophy, and practical reason. His article “Do Hypothetical Imperatives Require Categorical Imperatives?” is forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy. He is also interested in ancient philosophy, especially Plato. His current work focuses on questions about the nature of rational agency.
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Dustin TuckerDr. Tucker, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of Michigan; B.A., University of Washington), joined the department in 2011. His research is primarily in logic, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics, with particular focus on mental and linguistic content, paradoxes, and logics of practical reasoning. His papers "Paradoxes of Intensionality" and "Intensionality and Paradoxes in Ramsey's 'The Foundations of Mathematics'" have appeared in the Review of Symbolic Logic, and his "Outline of a Theory of Quantification" is forthcoming in Griffin and Linsky (ed.), Principia Mathematica: The Centenary Volume.
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Joel VelascoDr. Velasco (Ph.D., B.A. University of Wisconsin, Madison) will be joining the department in the fall of 2013. He has previously been an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at Stanford University, a visiting professor at Cornell University, and is currently finishing a post-doctoral appointment at the California Institute of Technology. He specializes in the philosophy of biology as well as the more general philosophy of science; in particular, issues in biological systematics and evolutionary theory as well as the use of probability in scientific reasoning.
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Mark WebbDr. Webb, Associate Professor and Chairman (Ph.D., Syracuse; M.A., B.A., and M.A. in Classical Humanities, Texas Tech) specializes in epistemology and philosophy of religion. He is currently working in the epistemology of religious experience, especially as it applies to non-Western religious experiences. Professor Webb's articles have appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Religious Studies, The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and Hypatia, and most recently "An Eliminativist Theory of Religion," in Sophia.
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Affiliated Faculty in other departments
Min-Joo Kim
Dr. Kim, Associate Professor of Linguistics (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts-Amherst;
MAs, UMass-Amherst, University of Arizona; BA, Chonnam National University, South
Korea), and Director of the Linguistics Program and Linguistics Minor, joined the
faculty of Texas Tech in 2005 after having taught at Northwestern University as a
visiting assistant professor of linguistics. She specializes in theoretical syntax
and its interfaces with morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. She also has secondary
interests in language acquisition and grammaticalization. The ultimate goal of her
research is to help uncover principles that govern the mapping between linguistic
form and meaning, i.e., how humans come to compute the (intended) meaning of an utterance
on the basis of its form. To this end, she has explored topics such as Noun Modification,
E-type Anaphora, Aspect, Existential Sentences, Free Choice, Implicature, Complementation
vs. Modification, Binding, Case, and Possessor Raising, examining data drawn from
English, Korean, Japanese, and Russian. Her work has appeared in the Journal of English Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Natural Language
Semantics, Language Research, and Journal of Cognitive Science, among others. She is currently working on a book on the syntax and the semantics
of noun modifiers and the theory of Universal Grammar.
E-mail: min-joo.kim@ttu.edu
Webpage: http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/minjkim/index.htm