Advising
Directed Studies and Summer Research opportunities for Philosophy Majors
Denison has one of the broadest and well funded undergraduate research programs in the nation. For such projects, it's best to locate a faculty advisor who specializes in the material you would like to study. The following are areas in which I might be helpful.
Generally:
Any topic in the philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of psychology, experimental philosophy, or epistemology.
Topics of particular interest:
Pyrrhonian skepticism
Experimental philosophy
Scientific explanation of all forms (causal, functionalist, unificatory, evolutionary, pragmatic, etc.)
The cognition and cognitive science of explanation and understanding
Action explanation
The tautology problem in natural selection
Theoretical constraint and the sources of normativity
Typological vs. populationist thinking
Theories of aberration and normality (as they relate to disability studies, queer theory, and theories of human nature)
Paradigm shifts, styles of reasoning, and conceptual schemes
Reduction and Emergence
Necessity and possibility, especially contextualist theories of possibility
Scientific realism, internal realism and constructivism
Philosophy of Psychology
Evolutionary epistemology
Virtue epistemology
The value problem in epistemology
The internalism-externalism debate in epistemology
Moral explanation
Moral realism
Ethics of Care
Abortion and personhood
(Liberal arts teaching allows you to read broadly!)
Summer Research, directed study and symps projects I have advised recently:
A Rortyan critique of the personhood debate, with Simon Mont
Lesbian partner violence, with Taylor Rose
Critiquing the Ethics of Care and its Humean roots, with Taylor Rose
Stuckness: Salvaging the Necessity of Kant's A Priori Intuitions through an Embodied Cognitivist, with Christoffer Stromstedt
Inductive reasoning and terrorist profiling, with Dave Zeile