Philosophy
|
Anthony J. Lisska
| Affiliation | Faculty | | Title | Professor | | Office | Knapp 205E | | Email | lisska@denison.edu | | Phone | 740-587-5616 |
See full resume [pdf] |
Dr. Lisska and students enjoy a rousing discussion.
I was educated at Providence College, graduating in
1963 with an AB degree (Cum Laude) in
Philosophy. I continued my work in
Philosophy, receiving my MA from St. Stephen’s College and my Ph.D. from The
Ohio State University. In addition, I
have a Certificate from the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University. I presently hold an endowed professorship in the
Department on Philosophy, and earlier I was awarded the Charles and Nancy
Brickman Distinguished Service Chair.
My most important graduate school mentor—although we didn’t use that term in
the late 1960s—was Robert G. Turnbull, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at
Ohio State and himself a most distinguished
scholar/teacher. It was Bob Turnbull who
forced me to re-think the scholastic philosophy from my earlier academic work
with the insights and rigor of contemporary analytic philosophy. That combination indeed made my scholarly
life. I have published nearly sixty
philosophical articles, essays in books, and book reviews in The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Teaching Philosophy, The Thomist, New Blackfriars (Oxford), The
Heythrop Journal (London), International
Philosophical Quarterly, Cross
Currents, Speculum, Philosophy in
Review and The Psychological
Record. I have also read philosophy
papers, nearly ninety in all, at all three divisional meetings of the American
Philosophical Association, several regional Philosophy associations, and
Institutes for Medieval Philosophy, among other conferences. My scholarly work has been directed towards
the texts of Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth century Aristotelian. Recent work centered on constructing an
analytic explicatio textus of
Aquinas’s work on ethical naturalism, which culminated in Aquinas Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction; this book appeared in 1996 from the
Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. A paperback edition was published in 1997 and reprinted in 2001. A more recent book-length manuscript has
focused on Aquinas’s account of perception in his philosophy of mind and how
this contrasts radically from the Cartesian model so prevalent in Modern
Philosophy. Recent lectures were given
at Northwestern University, Iona College, The University of Notre Dame, The
University of North Florida, Kenyon College, Marquette University, Villanova
University, Oklahoma State University, Luther College, The University of Scranton,
the national meetings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and
the Central and Pacific Divisions of the American Philosophical Association,
The International Thomas Aquinas Society, the Thomas More Society, and the
Smithsonian Institute. I gave the 2002
Aquinas Lecture at Providence College on recent scholarly work on the
philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the 2004
Suarez Lecture at Fordham University on “recta ratio” in Aquinas and Ockham, and presented the 2006 Aquinas Lecture on Aquinas and Natural
Law at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick. An essay on natural law appeared
in Contemporary Legal Problems: 1998 (OUP) and another in Virtue’s End: God in the Moral Philosophy of
Aristotle and Aquinas (St. Augustine Press, 2008). Two chapters, one on Aquinas and natural law
and the other on later medieval philosophy of law, recently appeared in an
international series on jurisprudence: Volume Six of A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence: A History of
the Philosophy of Law from the Ancient Greeks to the Scholastics (Springer,
2007). A chapter on Aquinas’s Theory of Mind appeared in a monograph entitled Analytical Thomism (Ashgate: 2006). In
2006, I served as the elected national President of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association; I delivered the presidential address at the annual
meetings held in Granville on issues in inner sense in Aquinas.
Teaching at an undergraduate college like Denison was always an aspiration. Working with students and helping them become
connected with philosophy is an activity I treasure immensely. In my early teaching days, I was concerned
that materials in philosophy either talked down to beginning students or were
too difficult for them. With this
problem in mind, I wrote Philosophy Matters
(Charles Merrill: 1978), which combined
what I took to be the best of an anthology and the best of an analytic
commentary. This book went through five
printings and has been re-printed privately for the 2007-08 academic year. In 1990, I received the Sears Teaching Award
at Denison and
in 1994 received the Carnegie Foundation United States Baccalaureate Colleges
Professor of the Year Award. My listing
appears in the Who’s Who in America, Who’s
Who in the World, Who’s Who in the Mid-west, and Who’s Who in American Education.
My intellectual avocation is regional history. I served on the Board of Management of the
Granville Historical Society for fifteen years; there another member and I
began a quarterly, The Historical Times,
which in 1991 won a state historical award. I still serve as an editor of this quarterly. I have published over
forty articles on local history, the most widely read treating an early 19th
century Roman Catholic Bishop who worked with Native Americans appeared in Oxford’s New Blackfriars (1993). In addition, I have given over thirty
presentations on topics in regional history. In 1985, I published A History of Aquinas College High School
and am presently completing A Short
History of East Columbus, Ohio. I am the author of An Illustrated History of the Buckeye Lake Yacht Club, which was
published in 2007. I am an editor of Volume One of the 2005 Bicentennial History of Granville, which appeared in late
2004. This book contains a chapter that I co-authored; Volume Two contains two
of my historical essays. This three-volume set recently received a national
award from the National Association of State and Local Historians.
I served Denison University as Dean of the
College for a five-year period, chaired the Philosophy Department twice, and
served as the founding Director of the Honors Program for fifteen years. I have been an evaluator for curriculum
projects on four occasions for The National Endowment for the Humanities and
have served as an external consultant for Honors Program development and
philosophy department evaluation. I am a
founding member of the National Association of Fellowship Advisors. Recent
Honors Program narratives have been presented to the American Council of Academic
Deans and at the National Meetings of the National Collegiate Honors
Council. I was the central author for Denison’s North Central
accreditation project in 1980. In 2004, I served as President of The Granville
Foundation.
June 9, 2008
Dr. Lisska READS!
