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Department Faculty


Afilliated Faculty
 
Robert Crease
Jeff Edwards
Harvey Cormier
David Allison
Edward S. Casey
Megan Craig
David Dilworth
Patrick Grim
Dick Howard
Don Ihde
Eva Feder Kittay

Allegra de Laurentiis
Peter Manchester
Gary Mar
Eduardo Mendieta
Clyde Lee Miller
Rita Nolan
Mary Rawlinson
Hugh J. Silverman
Lorenzo Simpson
Marshall Spector
Donn Welton

Lisa Diedrich
Donald Kuspit
Massimo Pigliucci
Peter Williams


Rotating Stars Program
(Previous visitors)

Noam Chomsky
Angela Y. Davis
Jacques Derrida
 
Robert Crease

Department Chair
Robert Crease

Professor
Ph.D. 1987, Columbia University
Department Chair

In philosophy of science, Robert Crease - also the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory - uses laboratory history to examine key issues in philosophy of science, science studies, and ethics. His books include The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (Random House, 2003), Making Physics: A Biography of Brookhaven National Laboratory, 1946-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and The Play of Nature, Experimentation as Performance (Indiana University Press, 1993). His edited books include Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997); and translations include What Things Do (Penn State Press, 2009), and, American Philosophy of Technology: The Empirical Turn (Indiana University Press, 2001) from the Dutch. Crease organized the Science Studies Forum, an interdisciplinary group of faculty in the social sciences, and is active in organizing and teaching ethics and science courses, including the training programs for the protection of human subjects in research. Crease writes a monthly column, "Critical Point," about science and society issues for Physics World. In philosophy of art, Crease is interested in the phenomenology of the lived body, especially related to dance. He wrote the entry on "Jazz and Dance" for both the Oxford and Cambridge Companions to Jazz.
(631)632-7583, rcrease@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu
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Jeff Edwards

Jeff Edwards

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1987, Universität Marburg, Germany

Apart from Stony Brook, Professor Edwards has taught at Villanova University and Miami University. He is the Stony Brook Director of the Transatlantic Collegium of Philosophy. Edwards' areas of concentration are in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the history of modern philosophy. His work has focused on Kant's relations to the history of modern science, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. He has written numerous articles, chapters, papers, and book reviews on these themes. The University of California Press has published his study on Kant's theory of knowledge and natural philosophy (Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge). Edwards has translated Dieter Henrich's Identity and Objectivity for Harvard University Press. He is the co-translator of Kant's first book, the Essay on Living Forces, which is being published by Cambridge University Press in its new edition of Kant's works in English. Edwards' current research centers on themes in modern moral philosophy. He is now finishing a book-Autonomy, Right, and Anthropology-that investigates problems of Kant's practical philosophy in connection with the history of modern ethics and natural-law theories.
(631) 632-7574, bedwards@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

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Harvey Cormier

Doctoral Program Director
Harvey Cormier

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1992, Harvard University
Doctoral Program Director

Harvey Cormier's dissertation was on the work of the psychologist and pragmatist philosopher William James. His work since then has taken on diverse subject matters such as Cornel West's Marx-influenced criticisms of James; Nietzsche on freedom and selfhood; the idea that Henry James the novelist was a pragmatist like his brother William; and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey considered as a work of modernist art. Cormier's book, The Truth Is What Works: William James, Pragmatism, and the Seed of Death (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), attributes to James the "Forrest Gump theory of truth," or the simple but profound idea that truth, like stupidity, is as it does or tends to do. Cormier thinks that this Darwinian "functionalist" approach to epistemology is the best one, and he is interested in the bearing of this idea on questions concerning psychology, evolution, human identity, and morality.
(631) 632-7312, Harvey.Cormier@stonybrook.edu

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David Allison

David Allison

Professor
Ph.D. 1974, Pennsylvania State University

David Allison's research interests focus on two principal projects - one examining the widespread and disturbing psychological disorder, Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, and a series of studies on the major works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Future research plans include the ongoing editing of the New Nietzsche Studies series, of which Allison is the co-editor, the composing of a second volume of his Nietzsche book, Reading the New Nietzsche (first volume published in August 2000), and the completion of his study on Descartes. This publication will be a commentary on Descartes' Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Allison is a member of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, the Nietzsche Society, the North American Nietzsche Society, and the Society for Philosophy and Literature among others. He is also the co-author of Disordered Mother or Disordered Diagnosis: Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome (Analytic Press, 1998). Allison has published articles in the Journal of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, and The New York Times Book Review, among others.
(631) 632-7570, David.Allison@Stonybrook.edu

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Ed Casey

Edward S. Casey

Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. 1967, Northwestern University

Edward Casey, past chairman of the department (1991-2001), works in aesthetics, philosophy of space and time, ethics, perception, and psychoanalytic theory. He obtained his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1967 and has taught at Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, The New School for Social Research, Emory University, and several other institutions. His published books include Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Studies in Continental Thought) (Indiana University Press, 2000), Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Studies in Continental Thought) (Indiana University Press, 2000), Getting Back into Place (Indiana University Press, 1993), and The Fate of Place (University of California Press, 1997). He has extended his close examination of the place-world to maps and landscape paintings in Representing Place in Landscape Paintings and Maps (Minnesota, 2002) and Earth-Mapping (Minnesota, 2005). A new direction of research is visual perception, with an emphasis on the unsuspected power and subtlety of the glance. A book titled The World at a Glance has just appeared (2007). Future projects will focus on edges, feeling, feeling and thinking. Overall, Casey's philosophical work is broadly descriptive and attempts to bear out the nuances of basic phenomena of human experience that have been neglected in earlier philosophical accounts.
(631) 632-7581, escasey@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu

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Megan Craig

Megan Craig

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 2007, The New School for Social Research

Megan Craig studied philosophy at Yale University and The New School for Social Research. She joined the department in 2007. She works in aesthetics, phenomenology, pragmatism, and ethics, and is currently working on a manuscript dealing with the relationship between Levinas's phenomenology and James's radical empiricism and the aesthetic dimensions of Levinas's prose. On-going research interests include contemporary painting in relation to phenomenology; painting after the "death" of painting; memory and trauma in Freud and Kristeva; notions of subjectivity, perception, and embodiment; and theories of color with an emphasis on Goethe and Wittgenstein. Craig has taught aesthetics and theory of art at Parsons School of Design, Eugene Lang College, and The Rhode Island School of Design. She is the founder of the Women in Philosophy Journal at The New School and editor of the book, Art? No Thing! Analogies Between Art, Science and Philosophy by Dutch artist and theorist Fré Ilgen. Craig is also a painter and continues to exhibit nationally and internationally.
(631) 632-7586, Megan.Craig@Stonybrook.edu

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David Dilworth

Undergraduate Program Director
David Dilworth

Professor
Ph.D. 1963, 1970 Fordham University, Columbia University
Undergraduate Program Director

David Dilworth regularly contributes translation and commentary to journals and books in the areas of modern Japanese philosophy, most recently in The Sourcebook for Modern Japanese Philosophy: Selected Documents (Greenwood Press, 1998). He is the author of Philosophy in World Perspective: A comparative Hermeneutic of the Major Theories (Yale, 1989), which is a systematic coordination of the principles of the classics of world philosophy. Dilworth is a specialist in modern Japanese Philosophy (The Kyoto School) and has interests in traditional figures such as K_kai and D_gen. He also specializes in classical American Pragmatism (Peirce, James, Dewey) and American transcendentalism stemming from Emerson.
(631) 673-7240, dd9414@aol.com

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Patrick Grim

Patrick Grim

Computational modeling, philosophical logic, and ethics
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Dick Howard

Dick Howard

Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. 1970, University of Texas at Austin

Dick Howard works on aspects of political philosophy and contemporary political thought, as well as the history of political thought. He is a frequent political commentator on French and Canadian radio and television. Among his books are The Marxian Legacy (1977, second expanded edition 1988), La naissance de la pensée politique américaine (1987, English translation 1990, German translation 2001), Defining the Political (1989), The Politics of Critique (1989), From Marx to Kant (1993, French translation 1996), Political Judgments (1996), Pour une critique du jugement politique (1998). More recent books include: The Specter of Democracy (2002), Aux origines de la pensée politique américaine (2004), and La démocratie à l'epreuve. Chroniques américaines (2006). He is completing a History of Political Thought, From Ancient Greece to the Democratic Revolutions, which will be published in the book series "Political Thought/Political History" of which he is the editor at Columbia University Press. Howard is on the editorial committees of journals in the US, England, France, Germany and Australia, and writes frequently on contemporary politics, from the op ed to the larger format.
(631) 632-7591, rhoward@ms.cc.sunysb.edu

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Don Ihde

Don Ihde

Distinguished Professor
Ph.D. 1964, Boston University

Don Ihde's career has encompassed three emphases. Early in his career, he undertook original studies in phenomenology, notably in the works Listening and Voice, Experimental Phenomenology, and more recently in Postphenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 1973). He has also been a North American pioneer in the philosophy of technology, publishing the widely recognized Technics and Praxis and Technology and the Lifeworld. More recently, he has turned to science studies or "technoscience." In these areas, his works Instrumental Realism (Indiana University Press, 1991), Expanding Hermeneutics:Visualism in Science, and Bodies in Technology are prominent. Ihde is researching imaging technologies and epistemology. He is active internationally and regularly gives doctoral seminars in several European countries. He directs the Technoscience Research Group and the Technoscience Research Seminar at the University. Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde (SUNY Press, 2006), contains essays concerning Ihde's work by nineteen prominent scholars has also been recently published.
(631) 632-7575, dihde@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu

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Eva Feder Kittay

Eva Feder Kittay

Professor
Ph.D. 1978, City University of New York

Eva Kittay's most recent books include Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (Thinking Gender Series, Routledge, 1999). She is co-editing Theoretical Perspectives on Dependency and Women with Ellen Feder (Rowman and Littlefield), Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy with L.Alcoff (Blackwell), Special Issue of Hypatia: Feminism and Disability with A. Silvers and S. Wendell, and Special Issue of Social Theory and Practice: Embodied Values: Philosophy and Disabilities with R. Gottlieb. Her other books include Women and Moral Theory, edited with D.T. Meyers (Rowman and Littlefield); Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Claredon Press, Oxford University Press 1987, 1980); and Frames, Fields and Contrasts, edited with A. Lehrer (Erlbaum, 1992). Her areas of expertise include feminist philosophy, feminist ethics, social and political theory, metaphor, and disability studies. She has taught and published more generally in philosophy of language and normative ethics and social thought.
(631) 632-7589, Eva.Kittay@Stonybrook.edu

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Allegra de Laurentiis

Allegra de Laurentiis

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1982, Universität Frankfurt, Germany

Allegra de Laurentiis studied philosophy at the universities of Roma, Tübingen and Frankfurt. Her dissertation (1982) is on the overlap of German Idealism and Marxian materialism. In 1987 she moved to the U.S. where she taught logic, German Idealism and Marxism at the University of Villanova. From 1991 to 1994 she was Assistant Professor at Miami University of Ohio, where her teaching and research focused mainly on Hegel's Logic and Phenomenology, the Young Hegelians and the Frankfurt School. She joined the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook in 1994. She is a co-founder of the first German-American graduate program in philosophy (Collegium Philosophiae Transatlanticum). She teaches graduate seminars on Aristotle, Hegel and Marxisms. Her undergraduate teaching includes ancient Greek and 19th-century philosophy. Most recently, she has published Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World (2005) and has contributed articles and book chapters on German Idealism and its relation to classical Greek philosophy. Her current research centers on Hegel's Anthropology and Psychology.
(631) 632-7588, adelaurentii@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu

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Peter Manchester

Peter Manchester

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1972, Graduate Theological Union, Berkley, CA

Peter Manchester's book The Syntax of Time: The Phenomenology of Time in Greek Physics and Speculative Logic was published in September, 2005 (Brill Academic Publishing). In 1972 he completed a Ph.D. dissertation project comparing Heidegger's analysis of temporality in Being and Time with the treatment of the interior structure of the mind in Augustine's treatise On the Trinity, and chose to continue that work in its ancient side, carrying back phenomenologically motivated questions about the nature and experience of time. With a 1975 post-doctoral fellowship at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Manchester began two decades of study and collaboration with the late professor A. H. Armstrong, initially on Plotinus's treatise On Eternity and Time, then pressing further into Aristotle, Plato, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. Coming to Stony Brook in 1980, he served as president of the North American Section of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies from 1982-86, and has since offered regular graduate seminars on Plato and Platonism, the Presocratics, and Aristotle. An informal graduate student-working group in philosophical Greek spun off from his 1997 seminar on the Presocratics and continues to be active.
(631) 632-7573, PManchester@ms.cc.sunysb.edu

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Gary Mar

Gary Mar

Associate Professor
PhD. 1985, University of California at Los Angeles

Professor Gary Mar has been a member of the Philosophy Department at Stony Brook University for 20 years. He is the founding director of the Philosophy Department Logic Lab and his dissertation at UCLA was the last one to be directed by the late great 20th century logician Alonzo Church. Professor Mar has co-authored two books in logic-the classic Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning (second edition) with Donald Kalish and Richard Montague and the path-breaking The Philosophical Computer (MIT, 1998) with Patrick Grim and Paul St. Denis. An article on the fractal images in the semantics of paradox is contained in Logic, Meaning and Computation: Essays in Memory of Alonzo Church (Synthese, 2001). This work has been discussed in Scientific American (Feb. 1993) and presented at the historic Kurt Gödel Centenary Symposium, Senate Hall, University of Vienna in April 2006. For the past 11 years Professor Mar has also been involved in pioneering the field of Asian American Philosophy. In 1996 he was the catalyst for the Charles B. Wang Asian American Center, which was built by the largest donation in the history of the public education system in New York State, and he currently is the director of the Asian American Center "Bridge". Dr. Mar has been an advocate for and active teacher of Asian American studies at Stony Brook University. Professor Mar developed the first regularly offered course in Asian American Studies at Stony Brook, which he has taught since 1997. Professor Mar was the founding President of the Asian American Faculty Staff Association at Stony Brook and was instrumental in the establishment of the Asian Pacific American Association at Brookhaven National Lab. In 1999 he successfully advocated for the inclusion of Asian American Philosophy within the American Philosophical Association and he will be chairing this committee for three years starting in 2008. In 2003 he co-taught a graduate seminar with Noam Chomsky on the President's Rotating Stars Program. He was the nominator for an honorary doctorate awarded in 2005 to PBS Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Loni Ding, whose landmark series Ancestors in the Americas (www.CETEL.org) is the only in-depth documentary on the history of Asians in the Americas. For the past nine years, he has been the organizer of an annual conference "With Liberty and Justice for All ..." which deals with the unduly neglected contributions of Asian Americans to struggles for social justice. He has also organized numerous events at the Wang Center including a program with international tennis champion Michael Chang. Gary Mar has directed grants for educating about Hate Crimes directed against Asian Pacific Americans sponsored by the Allstate Foundation and the Organization of Chinese Americans. He serves on a number of community boards, including the Council for Prejudice Reduction and Community Advisory Board for Public Television WLIW21. In 2005, he received a City of New York Proclamation from City Council Member John Liu, was honored with a Civil Advocacy Achievement Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans, Long Island, and has administered grants to conduct workshops on hate crimes from the Allstate Foundation and the Organization of Chinese Americans, an Asian American civil rights advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. Currently, Gary Mar is a member of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission and Commission's Education Committee. Gary Mar has been awarded a Pew Foundation Fellowship for his work in Philosophy of Religion, the President's and Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and an Outstanding Professor Award from the Alumni Association.
(631) 632-7582, Gary.Mar@stonybrook.edu

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Eduardo Mendieta

Director, MA Program
Eduardo Mendieta

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1996, New School for Social Research
Masters Program Director

Eduardo Mendieta was born in Colombia, but was raised in the United States. He has received degrees from Rutgers University, Union Theological Seminary and the New School. He also studied in Germany, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he worked with Jürgen Habermas. He has edited and translated from Spanish the works of one of Latin American's most important living philosophers Enrique Dussel. He has also edited and translated from the German work of the innovative philosopher Karl-Otto Apel. Over the last decade he has edited about a dozen books dealing with the Frankfurt School, contemporary Latin American philosophy, and issues relating to religion, globalization, and global justice. His most recent book is entitled Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latin Americanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY, 2007), and is presently finishing another book on philosophy and war entitled Philosophy's War: Nomos, Topos, Polemos. He has served on the editorial boards of City, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Constellations, and Sophia. He was the executive editor of Radical Philosophy Review until 2007, and founding member of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter of Hispanics in Philosophy. Most recently he published a collection of political interviews with Richard Rorty entitled Take Care of Freedom, and Truth Will take Care of itself (Stanford University Press, 2006), as well as book of interviews with radical philosopher and prison activist Angela Y. Davis dealing with Abu Ghraib, mass incarceration in the United States, and torture as a weapon of the state, entitled Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Torture and War (Seven Stories Press, 2006). Prof. Mendieta has also been working on what he likes to call "philosophical animals." At the center of this recent project are two simple questions: can we ever divorce the question of the human from the question of the animals, and can philosophy not invent its own 'philosophical animals' in order to answer the prior question? Mendieta claims that 'the metaphorics of humanity is entwined with the metaphorics of animality.' In this project, however, Prof. Mendieta aims to complicate this picture by introducing the issue of biotechnology and genomics: does not the future of transgenic organisms, both vegetable and animal, make all too evident what has already being at play in the history of nature: namely a swapping and sharing of genes that have allowed us to co-evolve as 'genomic companion species.' So along with customary bestiaries that accompany philosophical investigations about the nature of the human, we have now to consider the already well-populated transgenic zoos of biotechnological chimeras of the genomic age.
(631) 632-7577, Eduardo.Mendieta@stonybrook.edu

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Clyde Lee Miller

Clyde Lee Miller

Associate Professor
Ph.D. 1974, Yale University
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Personnel

Lee Miller studied classics and medieval philosophy at St. Louis University before going on to doctoral studies in philosophy at Yale, where he wrote a dissertation on Plato's Protagoras. At Stony Brook he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Plato, Aristotle, medieval philosophy, and ethics. He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Teaching. His scholarly research has focused on Nicholas of Cusa, a Christian Neoplatonist of the early Renaissance. He has published many articles and two translations, one of Nicholas' Idiote de Mente, a second of Jean Gerson's De Consolatione Theologiae. His monograph on Nicholas of Cusa, Reading Cusanus appeared in 2002 (Catholic University Press).
(631) 632-7583, cmiller@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu

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Rita Nolan

Rita Nolan

Professor
Ph.D. 1965, University of Pennsylvannia

Rita Nolan studied the history of philosophy for her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Boston College where Zeno Vendler, philosopher of language and linguistics, introduced her to contemporary philosophy. She went on to the University of Pennsylvania to study contemporary philosophy of art and philosophy of language for the Ph.D. At Penn, she studied with the pragmatist/constructivist philosopher, Nelson Goodman, philosophy of art and philosophy of language with Paul Ziff (student of Max Black and J.L. Austin), and formal linguistics with Zellig Harris, the inventor of transformational grammars and innovator in using mathematical structures to model linguistic structures. While a student at Penn, Nolan resigned a teaching assistantship in philosophy to become a research assistant on the National Science Foundation Project on Formal Linguistics, was recipient of the Bacon Dissertation Year Fellowship, and was briefly an Instructor in Philosophy. Nolan's research has ranged broadly, always radiating from philosophy of art and philosophy of language. The dimension of philosophy that has driven her research in language and in art is its goal to integrate the results of sound and ongoing research in the special sciences, like physics and psychology, into philosophical inquiry whenever those sciences have bearing on that inquiry. One thread of her recent research considers questions how the arts may be related to human understanding and knowledge; for example, whether external symbolic artifacts have a role in mediating relations between perceptual categories that are species-universal as a result of natural selection and the discursive conceptual categories carved out by our language(s). An early outcome of this work is the paper she read at the April, 2006 meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Society for Aesthetics, "Art and Non-Epistemic Perceptual Content." Rita Nolan has been a visiting faculty member at Barnard College of Columbia University, The University of Warwick, UK, where she was Professor of Philosophy, Wolfson College of Oxford University, and the Wittgenstein Archives of the University of Bergen, Norway. She was awarded the George Santayana Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and she has lectured in Austria, Brazil, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden. She has also taught at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and the University of North Carolina.
(631)632-7595, Rita.Nolan@Stonybrook.edu

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Mary Rawlinson

Mary Rawlinson

Associate Professor
Joint Appointment with Comparative Literature
Ph.D. 1978, Northwestern University

Mary Rawlinson is the co-editor of The Voice of Breast Cancer in Medicine and Bioethics (Springer, 2006) and Derrida and Feminism (Routledge, 1997), as well as the editor of five issues of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, including Foucault and the Philosophy of Medicine, The Future of Psychiatry, and Feminist Bioethics. Her publications include articles on Hegel, Proust, literature and ethics, and French feminism. She is the Editor of The International Journal on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. (IJFAB), as well as the Co-director of The Irigaray Circle. Rawlinson served fours years as Associate Dean for Curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences and founded the Learning Communities Program. She won the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 and was Stony Brook's nominee for Carnegie Teacher of the Year in 1997. She is an Affiliated Faculty in both Comparative Literature and Women's Studies.
(631)632-7593, mrawlinson@notes.cc.stonybrook.edu

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Anne O'Byrne

Anne O'Byrne

Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 1999, Vanderbilt University

Anne O'Byrne's field of research is 20th century and contemporary European philosophy. From her dissertation, "Who are we?": Plurality and the Questioning of Philosophy, to her present project of natality (the existential condition of having been born) and finitude, her work has been at the intersection of ontology and politics. In her articles she investigates the political and ontological questions that arise around embodiment ("The Politics of Intrusion" in The New Centennial Review), gender ("The Excess if Justice" in International Studies in Philosophy), labor ("Symbol, Exchange and Birth" in Philosophy and Social Criticism) and pedagogy ("Pedagogy without a Project" in Studies in Philosophy and Education) using the work of authors such as Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Baudrillard and Julia Kristeva. O'Byrne also maintains an interest in Irish Studies and has written philosophical work concerning the functioning of sovereignty in Northern Ireland and the inheritance of the Irish language. At Stony Brook and while on faculty at Hofstra University (1999-2007) she has taught courses in feminist philosophy, social and political philosophy, philosophy of art, philosophy and the Holocaust, modernity and post-modernity, existentialism, phenomenology, and Nietzsche.
(631) 632-7577, Anne.O'Byrne@stonybrook.edu

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Hugh
Silverman

Hugh J. Silverman

Professor
Joint Appointment with Comparative Literature
Ph.D., 1973, Stanford University

Hugh J. Silverman is Executive Director of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature www.iapl.info and Co-Director of the International Philosophical Seminar (Alto Adige, Italy). He served as Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (1980-86) and President of the Stony Brook Arts and Sciences Senate (1998-2000). He is Program Director of the interdisciplinary Art and Philosophy Advanced Graduate Certificate, holds a joint title appointment with the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and is an affiliated faculty member in Art, and in European Language, Literatures, and Cultures. He has been Visiting Professor at the Universities of Warwick, Leeds, Torino, Rome-Tor Vergata, Nice, Vienna, Klagenfurt, Helsinki, Tampere, Trondheim, Sydney, Tasmania, and Fulbright-University of Vienna Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (2000-01). Author of Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (Routledge, 1994, German, 1997, Italian, 2003) and Inscriptions:After Phenomenology and Structuralism (2nd ed., Northwestern, 1997), his many edited or co-edited books include: Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to his Philosophy (Duquesne, 1980), Continental Philosophy in America (1983), Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (SUNY, 1985), Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY, 1988), The Horizons of Continental Philosophy (1988), The Textual Sublime (SUNY, 1990), Writing the Politics of Difference (SUNY, 1991), Textualität der Philosophie: Philosophie und Literatur (1994), Merleau-Ponty's Texts and Dialogues: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture (Humanity Books, 1996), Piaget, Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Northwestern, 1997), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty (2nd ed., Northwestern, 1997), Derrida und die Politiken der Philosophie (Turia+Kant, 2002), and Über Zizek: Perspektiven un Kritiken (Turia+Kant,2004). Editor of several book series, his Routledge Continental Philosophy series includes: Derrida and Deconstruction (1989), Postmodernism-Philosophy and the Arts (1990), Gadamer and Hermeneutics (1991), Questioning Foundations (1994), Cultural Semiosis (1998), Philosophy and Desire (2000), Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime (2002), and Foucault's Genealogies (forthcoming).
(631) 632-7592, hugh.silverman@stonybrook.edu
Webpage: http://ms.cc.sunysb.edu/~hsilverman/

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Lorenzo Simpson

Lorenzo Simpson

Professor
Ph.D. 1978, Yale University

Trained in both physics and philosophy, Lorenzo Simpson's research interests include contemporary Continental philosophy, philosophy of the natural and social sciences, philosophy of technology, neopragmatism, and philosophy and race. His recent work has emerged from a critical engagement with various aspects of postmodernism. This has culminated in two books, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity (Routledge, 1995) and The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (Routledge, 2001). Simpson is now exploring the science and multiculturalism debates, as well as the relationship between musical aesthetics and social theory. He has also published articles and book chapters in the areas of hermeneutics, Critical Theory, the philosophy of science and technology, and African-American philosophy. Simpson is a member of the Consulting Board of Stony Brook's Humanities Institute, the program committee of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and is on the editorial board of a number of professional journals. He was awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award by the State Council of Higher Education of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2008, Simpson will be the Visiting Mars Professor in the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics and the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He is also an aspiring jazz saxophonist.
(631) 632-7594, lsimpson@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

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Marshall Spector

Marshall Spector

Professor
Ph.D. 1963, Johns Hopkins University

In recent years, Marshall Spector's research and teaching interests have focused on the intersection of philosophy of technology and environmental issues. He is fascinated by the ways in which various cultures interact with their physical environments through their technologies and how other aspects of these cultures affect that interaction. He finds this nest of relations in our own scientific-industrial culture of the past few centuries to be particularly interesting. Spector has been with the Stony Brook Department of Philosophy since 1968. He has written Methodological Foundations of Relativistic Mechanics (Notre Dame Press) and Concepts of Reduction in Physical Science (Temple University Press) and has contributed to such publications as Philosophy of Science and the Occult and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
(631) 632-7598, mspector@ms.cc.sunysb.edu

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Donn Welton

Donn Welton

Professor
Ph.D. 1973, Southern Illinois University

Having studied with Ludwig Landgrebe in Köln and Gillan at Southern Illinois, Donn Welton's initial focus was on German and French phenomenology in general and the thought of Edmund Hussler in particular. This resulted in two book-length studies of Husserl, the first on his theory of meaning in the context of his accounts of perception and language, the second on the range of his static and genetic phenomenological method in the context of his relationship to Heidegger, arguing that Husserl's thought has a systematic scope and methodological resources that many critics think were excluded by his approach. Moving beyond an historical account, the second study also develops the beginnings of a viable theory of context and back ground, one of the most pressing issues under consideration today. Along with these two studies, he has edited an anthology of Husserl's writings and, most recently, a critical reader on his philosophy. With further research at the Universities of Tübingen and Oxford and ongoing collaborative work at the University of Marburg, Welton's current focus is on theory of person and semantics of psychosomatic symptoms.
(631)632-7579, dwelton@ms.cc.sunysb.edu

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Affiliated Faculty

Robert Harvey

Robert Harvey

Affiliated Faculty
Professor of Comparative Literature
French Thought

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Lisa Diedrich

Lisa Diedrich

Affiliated Faculty, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies Program
Feminist cultural studies of health and illness, disability studies, transnational feminisms, feminist theories and methodologies

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Donald Kuspit

Donald Kuspit

Joint Appointment with the Art Department
Aesthetics and art theory

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Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci

Affiliated Faculty
Professor of Ecology and Evolution
Philosophy of Natural Science, Philosophy of Evolution

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Peter Williams

Peter Williams

Joint Appointment with the Department of Preventive Medicine
Philosophy of law, philosophy of medicine, ethics

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*Recent visitors who have taught full-credit, intensive seminars in the department of philosophy include Manfred Baum, Rudolf Bernet, Claus Held, Claude Lefort, Dominique Janicaud, Jacques Taminiaux, Bernard Waldenfels, Burkhard Tuschling, Eugene Gendlin, Bruce Wilshire and Jean-Francois Lyotard


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Rotating Stars Program


Through funds provided by the Office of the President, the department has established the Rotating Stars Program, under which one of three 'stars' in the discipline visits the department each year to offer an intensive, full-credit seminar. Previous visitors:
Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky

Regular Visiting Faculty
Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Semantics, Philosophy of Language, Political Dissidence, Democracy and Sovereignty, Global Political Development.

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Angela Davis

Angela Y. Davis

Regular Visiting Faculty
Feminism, African American studies, critical theory, popular music culture and social consciousness, philosophy of punishment (women's jails and prisons)

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Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida


Post-structuralism, post-modernism, deconstruction, literary theory


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