Philosophy Department Faculty
Zara Amdur
Dr. Amdur (Ph.D. in Philosophy, M.A. in Classical Studies, Boston University; B. A., Saint John’s College Santa Fe) specializes in ancient Greek and feminist philosophy. Her research is on gendered imagery and characters in ancient Greek texts. In particular, she focuses on Plato’s metaphors of sexual reproduction and how they illuminate Socratic educational practices. She has additional projects on other Platonic metaphors, ancient Greek medicine, and early Greek literature.
- Email: Zara.Amdur@ttu.edu
- Webpage: https://amdur.xyz/
Thomas Byrne
Dr Byrne, Assistant Professor, specialises in moral theory, metaphysics and the philosophy of law. He’s recently been interested in issues surrounding causation and responsibility, both legal and moral. He completed his PhD at MIT and his BA and MPhil at King’s College London. His work has appeared in Philosophical Studies, Philosophers’ Imprint, Jurisprudence, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
- Email: t.byrne@ttu.edu
- Webpage: http://www.myweb.ttu.edu/thbyrne/
Angela Curran
Dr. Curran, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst) specializes in ancient Greek philosophy and philosophy of art. Her main interest is understanding Aristotle’s views on what makes us human. Her current work is a book project, Moving Truths, investigating Aristotle’s ideas on how we can learn from art and papers on the distinctions Aristotle draws between humans and humans and non-human animals. She has published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals as well as edited anthologies and is the author of The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics.
- Email: ancurran@ttu.edu
Howard Curzer
Dr. Curzer, President's Excellence in Research Professor (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin; M.A., B.A. in Mathematics, Wesleyan University), came to Texas Tech in 1985. His current areas of interest are ancient philosophy, contemporary virtue ethics, existentialism, and Confucian philosophy. His publications include Difficult Virtues: An Aristotelian Perspective, (Routledge, forthcoming), Virtue Ethics for the Real World: Improving Character Without Idealization (Routledge, 2023), Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford, 2012), Ethical Theory and Moral Problems (Wadsworth, 1999), and 70 articles on various topics. He is a co-recipient of an NSF grant to study and teach wildlife research ethics, a recipient of an NEH grant to study and teach Confucian virtue ethics, and a co-editor of a special issue of the ILAR Journal (2013), a journal of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Email: howard.curzer@ttu.edu
- Webpage: http://sites.google.com/site/howardcurzer/home
Francesca di Poppa
Dr. 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.
- Email: fdipoppa@gmail.com
A.K. Flowerree
Dr. Flowerree, Associate Professor (PhD, Northwestern University) specializes in epistemology, ethics, and metaethics. Her first research project explored why epistemic requirements matter for agents. Her recent work has focused on interpreting persons and texts. She is additionally interested in the epistemology of narrative, conspiracy theories, and fake news. Her work has appeared Philosophical Studies, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Episteme, among other places. For AY 2023-24, she was visiting assistant research professor at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame.
- Email: Amy.Flowerree@TTU.edu
- Webpage: https://akflowerree.weebly.com/
Joseph Gottlieb
Dr. Gottlieb, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago), specializes in the philosophy of mind, focusing on consciousness and perception. He also has deep interests in existential risk, cognitive science, and the history of early modern philosophy.
- Email: joseph.gottlieb@gmail.com
- Webpage: http://myweb.ttu.edu/josgottl/
Christopher Hom
Dr. Hom, Associate Professor (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine LPS), primarily works in philosophy of language and metaethics, in particular, issues surrounding racial epithets, expressive meaning, and moral expressivism. He also has interests in philosophy of mind, philosophy of race, and philosophical logic. His work has appeared in such venues as Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Noûs. He is a former faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. He is currently working on a book about ideological language.
- Email: christopher.hom@ttu.edu
- Webpage: http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/chom/
Justis Koon
Dr. Koon, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Massachusetts Amherst; M.A. Tufts University, B.A. Hamline University), specializes in epistemology, ethics, and metaethics. Dr. Koon's research focuses on how human biology and evolutionary history bear on important questions about knowledge and morality. His work has appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, and Synthese.
- Email: jukoon@ttu.edu
- Webpage: https://www.justiskoon.com/
Daniel Nathan
Dr. Nathan, Professor (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago; A.B. (Hons), University of Michigan), writes and teaches in the areas of aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy of law. Among other places, his work has appeared in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Erkenntnis, British Journal of Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Public Affairs Quarterly. Representative recent papers include: "A Paradox in Intentionalism," British Journal of Aesthetics (2005) and "Art, Meaning, and Artist's Meaning," in Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Art, ed. Kieran (Oxford UK, 2006). Currently, he continues his work on problems of interpretation in law and in the arts, as well as on the nature and grounds of aesthetic value.
Anna Christina Ribeiro
Dr. Ribeiro, Professor (Ph.D., Maryland; M.A., B.Phil., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; B.A. Hunter College, CUNY) specializes in aesthetics, particularly the philosophies of literature and poetry. She has Beautiful Speech: The Nature, Origins, and Powers of Poetry under contract with Oxford University Press, The Philosophy of Poetry and Literature under contract with Routledge, and is the editor of The Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics (2012/15). She has been awarded fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Mellon/Woodrow Wilson Foundations, and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Ribeiro has been a visiting researcher at the University of Barcelona and a visiting professor at the University of Vienna. Her most recent publication is 'The Gift of the Lyric', in The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, edited by J. Langkau and P. Engisch (Routledge 2022). She is on the editorial board of The British Journal of Aesthetics and is a recent trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics.
- Email: Anna-Christina.Ribeiro@ttu.edu
- Web page: annachristinaribeiro.com
Michael Schon
Michael works on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His research focuses on the metaphysical relationship between the phenomenal properties of experience and the properties of ordinary physical objects (particularly the brain and central nervous system of conscious beings), the nature of necessity and related concepts like essence and fundamentality, how our concepts refer to entities in the world, what it means for something to be conscious, and how and whether the mind has causal powers and whether these are the same or different in kind to the causal powers of physical objects. Michael also has teaching interests in ethics, the foundations of philosophical traditions around the world, and logic.
- Email: mschon@ttu.edu
- Webpage:https://sites.google.com/view/michaelschon
Jeremy Schwartz
Dr. Schwartz, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies (Ph.D., Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, B.A., University of Chicago) specializes in ethics, metaethics, and Kant. Broadly, Dr. Schwartz works within the Kantian tradition and tries to work out how these thoughts might apply to contemporary debates. Currently, he is working on the semantics of constructivism and expressivism and, separately, issues in Kantian ethics like whether emotions can be cultivated and how we ought to understand the duty of gratitude. His work has appeared in journals such as Nous, Philosophical Studies, European Journal of Philosophy, and the Kantian Review.
- Email: jeremy.m.schwartz@ttu.edu
- Webpage:http://www.myweb.ttu.edu/jereschw/
Joel Velasco
Dr. Velasco, Associate Professor and Chair (Ph.D., B.A. University of Wisconsin, Madison) specializes in the philosophy of biology as well as more general philosophy of science and epistemology. In particular, he has worked on issues in biological systematics and evolutionary theory as well as the use of probability in scientific reasoning. His work has appeared in a number of places such as Philosophy of Science, the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Biology and Philosophy, and Systematic Biology.
- Email: joel.velasco@ttu.edu
- Webpage: http://joelvelasco.net
Lecturers and Instructors
John DePoe
Dr. John DePoe (Ph.D. University of Iowa; Philosophy M.A. Western Michigan University; Religion M.A. Hardin-Simmons University) specializes in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and the metaphysics of mind. He proposes an evidentialist framework where epistemic justification begins with one’s direct acquaintance with one’s own states of mind. Moreover, he wrestles with the problem of evil and defends a form of skeptical theism. His published work can be found in Synthese, Philosophical Studies, Ratio, Acta Analytica, Philosophia Christi, among others. His views on religious epistemology can be found in his co-edited volume, Debating Christian Religious Epistemology: An Introduction to Five Views on the Knowledge of God (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
- Email: jdepoe@ttu.edu
- Webpage: https://johndepoe.weebly.com
Justin Morton
Justin Morton (Ph.D., University of Texas) works in ethics, metaethics, and philosophy of religion (especially, recently, at the intersection of these fields). His work has appeared in Philosophical Studies, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, among others. He's currently working on a book on God and morality, as well as a major research project on the grounding of moral virtue.
- Email: jamemort@ttu.edu
- Webpage: justinmorton.weebly.com
Douglas Westfall
Douglas Westfall, Lecturer, received his degrees from Texas Tech (M.A. in Philosophy and B.A. in Literature/Philosophy). His areas of interest are Ethics, Aesthetics, and Literature. His current research interest is in the discourse between philosophy and literature as it relates to social reform.
- E-mail: douglas.westfall@ttu.edu
Affiliated Faculty in other departments
Aaron Braver
Dr. Braver, Associate Professor of Linguistics (Ph.D., Rutgers University; BA, Brandeis University) and Director of the Linguistics Programs, joined Texas Tech in 2013. He specializes in phonetics, phonology, and their interface, with an emphasis on non-contrastive distinctions. His research investigates the ways in which speech sounds are organized, produced, perceived, and manipulated by our linguistic system. Much of this work takes place in the laboratory, with both speech production and speech perception experiments. He has worked on many linguistic phenomena, including incomplete neutralization, flapping, vowel lengthening, emphatic lengthening, and DP-internal ellipsis in English, Japanese, and Spanish, among other languages.
- E-mail: aaron.braver@ttu.edu
- Webpage: http://www.aaronbraver.com
Min-Joo Kim
Dr. Kim, Professor of Linguistics (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst; MAs, UMass Amherst, University of Arizona; BA, Chonnam National University, South Korea), specializes in theoretical syntax, semantics, and their interface. She has worked on various linguistic phenomena including Noun Modification, E-type Anaphora, Existential Sentences, Free Choice, Implicature, Aspect, and Evidentiality. She has over 30 publications including four books and her work has appeared in prestigious journals like Linguistic Inquiry, Studies in Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and Natural Language Semantics. She is TTU's 2019 Integrated Scholar and Recipient of the 2021 President's Faculty Book Award. She served as Director of Linguistics at TTU for over 10 years. And she has served her discipline in numerous ways including as Associate Editor for the high-impact Open Access journal Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.
- E-mail: min-joo.kim@ttu.edu
- Webpage: http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/minjkim/index.htm
Emeritus and Retired Faculty
Edward Averill
Dr. 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).
- Email: edward.averill@ttu.edu
- CV: Dr. Averill's CV
Walter Schaller
Dr. Schaller, Associate Professor Emeritus (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).
- Email: walter.schaller@ttu.edu
- Phone: (806) 742-3277
- Webpage: http://webpages.acs.ttu.edu/wschalle/home.htm
Mark Webb
Dr. Webb, Professor Emeritus (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.
- Email: mark.webb@ttu.edu
- Phone: (806) 742-3275
- Webpage: http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/mawebb/
Department of Philosophy
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Address
Box 43092, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-3092 -
Phone
806.742.3275 | Fax: 806.742.0730 -
Email
joel.velasco@ttu.edu