•  3
    “Imaginationland” is an Emmy winning, three‐part story from South Park's eleventh season that was later reissued as a movie with all of the deleted scenes included. This chapter talks about the connection between imagination and something philosophers like to call critical thinking‐that is, being able to cut through the crap and see things clearly‐something that seems to be in short supply these days, especially when it comes to thinking about terrorist threats. The chapter deals with unimaginat…Read more
  •  143
    CONFERENCE PAPER: In the early 20th century, John Dewey helped revolutionize the way education was thought of in the United States. Nearly fifty years after his death, however, much of his vision is still yet to be realized. Perhaps one explanation for this would be that educators have not yet embraced the most important feature of Dewey’s thinking on education, viz. that education as a cumulative process is a interwoven with the continuous developments in social and ethical life, indeed culture…Read more
  •  22
    This dissertation will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese daoist Zhuangzi and will defend two central claims. The first of these is that Dewey and Zhuangzi share a view of nature that is non-reductive, philosophically liberal, and more comprehensive than the accounts recurrent in much of the Western tradition. This alternate conception of nature is non-reductive in the way that it avoids the physically mechanistic…Read more
  •  15
    This chapter examines Thoreau’s experiences on Mt. Katahdin, vis-à-vis exposure science and wilderness therapy. A close reading of Thoreau’s account suggests the experience had a profound effect on him, emotionally and philosophically, an effect that is relevant to environmental exposure and eco-vulnerability in the contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Thoreau’s experience on that mountain presented to him an aspect of wilderness antithetical to the romantic, transcendentalist n…Read more
  •  185
    The focus of this paper will be on the earliest Greek treatments of impulse, motivation, and self-animation – a cluster of concepts tied to the hormē-conatus concept. I hope to offer a plausible account of how the earliest recorded views on this subject in mythological, pre-Socratic, and Classical writings might have inspired later philosophical developments by establishing the foundations for an organic, wholly naturalized approach to human inquiry. Three pillars of that approach which I wish t…Read more
  •  586
    "Who is the More Pragmatic Daoist - Laozi or Zhuangzi?
    Northwest Journal of Philosophy 1 (1): 1-15. 2010.
  • Socrates, the Eros of Philosophy and American Naturalism
    Skepsis: A Journal for Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Research 16 (1-2). 2005.
    In this paper, I treat Socrates as a model both philosophically, by reflecting upon how, as a lover, he might serve as a model for we later, self-avowed “lovers of wisdom” and heuristically, by showing how the Eros of philosophy consists in bringing the views of the newly initiated into a dialogue with those of the philosophically well-versed, to bring them into a Socratic dialectic.
  •  557
    Those who have considered the connection between Dewey’s theory of inquiry and Greek thought have mostly situated their remarks within larger points, regarding either teaching and learning (Garrison, 1997; Johnston, 2006b; Cahn, 2007) or aesthetics and craft (Alexander, 1987; Hickman, 1990). The fact that this area remains somewhat underexplored could be chalked up to several factors: 1) Dewey was often quite critical of the classical tradition, particularly when it came to theories of knowledge…Read more
  •  638
    This chapter focuses on Daoist praxeology and language in order to build something of a moral realist position (the contours of which may differ from most western versions insofar as it need not commit to moral cognitivism) that hinges on the seemingly paradoxical notions of ineffable moral truths and non-transferable moral skill.
  •  377
    Over the last eighty years, studies in play have carved out a small, but increasingly significant, niche within the social sciences and a rich repository has been built which underscores the importance of play to social, cultural, and psychological development. The general point running through these works is a philosophical recognition that play should not be separated from the trappings of everyday life, but instead should be seen as one of the more primordial aspects of human existence. Gad…Read more
  •  395
    Naturalism and Moral Expertise in the Zhuangzi
    Journal of East-West Thought 7 (3): 13-27. 2017.
    This essay will examine scholarly attempts at distilling a proto-ethical philosophy from the Daoist classic known as the Zhuangzi. In opposition to interpretations of the text which characterize it as amoralistic, I will identify elements of a natural normativity in the Zhuangzi. My examination features passages from the Zhuangzi – commonly known as the “knack” passages – which are often interpreted through some sort of linguistic, skeptical, or relativistic lens. Contra such readings, I believe…Read more
  •  339
    This paper will compare the concept of nature as it appears in the philosophies of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Chinese text known as the Zhuangzi, with an aim towards mapping out a heuristic program which might be used to correct various interpretive difficulties in reading each figure. I shall argue that Dewey and Zhuangzi both held more complex and comprehensive philosophies of nature than for which either is typically credited. Such a view of nature turns on the notion of con…Read more
  •  25
    Dewey's students at Columbia saw him as "an Aristotelian more Aristotelian than Aristotle himself." However, until now, there has been little consideration of the influence Greek thought had on the intellectual development of this key American philosopher. By examining, in detail, Dewey's treatment and appropriation of Greek thought, the authors in this volume reveal an otherwise largely overlooked facet of his intellectual development and finalized ideas. Rather than offering just one unified a…Read more