Other Teaching Interests

In addition to the classes that I have already taught, I have a broad range of additional teaching interests. For example, I would be interested in teaching a course on the philosophy of art that combines a study of aesthetic appreciation with an examination of the cognitive mechanisms involved in our attraction to beauty. We are often drawn to some pieces of art but repulsed by others, and there are potentially fruitful tools in both contemporary and historical philosophy of mind and phenomenology that may help to better understand aesthetic appreciation. Another course that I would like to teach would focus on a range of topics in social metaphysics, such as the type of unity formed in social groups (e.g., orchestras, sports teams, religious congregations), the nature of social relations, issues related to shared agency, etc. This class would draw on diverse literature, including work on collective agency in contemporary social ontology, theories of intersubjectivity in phenomenology, and discussions of joint attention in philosophy of mind and developmental psychology. Finally, as an avid reader of literature, I would love to teach courses that focus on important literary works as an aid to understanding certain philosophical frameworks. Chief among such classes would be a course on the works of Shakespeare that concentrates on issues in ethics and moral psychology, a course on Dante’s Divine Comedy and medieval conceptions of virtue and vice, a course in which we read selected works from Dostoyevsky alongside a variety of existentialist philosophers who consider the nature of hope, despair, and love, and a course on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Neoplatonic metaphysics.