Teaching Philosophy, In Brief

I view teaching as an opportunity to combat how, too often and easily, through habit or absentmindedness, the way things are become the way things ought to be. My goal in the classroom is to empower my students to recognize themselves as effective decision-makers capable of both understanding the present situation and improving upon it. My ideal courses focus on the unthought practices of everyday life and how we can unwittingly adopt routines or habits that obscure our relationship to others and the world we share. Emphasizing the mundane – and, in doing so, making the banal into something strange and worthy of study – promotes the critical thinking and questioning that I believe is so necessary today.

I am currently teaching PHIL/RELS 465: Ethics After the Holocaust. Next semester I will teach PHIL 251: Contemporary Moral Issues.

I have taught the following courses: Introduction to Logic, Contemporary Moral Issues, Ethics and Engineering, and Ethics in Society. See below for an overview of some courses I am prepared to teach.

1936 photo, allegedly of August Landmesser not giving the Nazi salute

Ethics After the Holocaust

An upper-level undergraduate or graduate course that focuses on the "after" of the course title, "Ethics After the Holocaust." Central to this course is the relationship between responsibility and theodicy.

Authors include: Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Donatella Di Cesare, Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, Immanuel Kant, Sarah Kofman, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, and Edith Wyschogrod.

Prepared for Departments of Philosophy and Religious or Jewish Studies.

Jacob Jordaens, The Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery of Ireland)

Introduction to Philosophy

An introductory undergraduate course that works thematically (from truth to revolution, from love to responsibility) to ask and answer the question, "Why philosophize?"

Authors include: Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Iris Murdoch, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Prepared for Departments of Philosophy.

The Enlightenment

An undergraduate course that focuses on the history of the European Enlightenment and its enduring relevance for (and its unthought presence in) contemporary thought.

Authors include: Maragaret Cavendish, Ann Conway, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Charles W. Mills, David Novak, Carole Pateman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel Serres, and Adam Smith.

Prepared for Departments of Philosophy, French, and Religious or Jewish Studies.

Exhaustion

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.” Pindar, Pythian Odes 3.

An upper-level undergraduate courses that focuses on the significance of "exhaustion" to existential philosophy and the philosophical underpinnings of today's "burnout culture."

Authors include: Aristotle, Archimedes, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, David Graeber, Byung-Chul Han, Georges Perec, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone Weil.

Prepared for Departments of Philosophy and French.