Evan Dutmer

Culver Academies
  •  19
    To Form More than to Inform
    with Paul Blaschko, Haley Dutmer, and Blake Ziegler
    American Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 8 30-49. 2023.
    In this paper we argue that God and the Good Life, a prominent philosophy as a way of life (PWOL) undergraduate course, serves the needs of novices in philosophy classrooms, whether they plan to continue in the study of philosophy or not. We draw from both philosophy and educational psychology in making our case and highlight four distinctive components of God and the Good Life pedagogy at the University of Notre Dame: 1) transformative learning goals, 2) immersive experiences, 3) deep personal …Read more
  •  15
    Many introductory courses in ethics stress competence in ethical theories popular in modern Western, Anglophone philosophy. This is limiting to ethics students in two ways: 1) it privileges theory over practice in the area of philosophy that has the most intuitive practical importance and application and 2) it privileges modern Western ethical theory at the expense of philosophical and practical engagement with all other world ethical systems. This essay seeks to provide a pedagogical corrective…Read more
  •  11
    Augustine's Political Thought ed. by Richard J. Dougherty
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (2): 330-332. 2021.
    "Augustine's City of God is not a treatise of political or social philosophy." So begins Christian Tornau's section on political philosophy in his entry on Augustine for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evident in this remark is the ambivalence with which historians of philosophy have generally treated the political philosophy of the great late antique philosopher of northern Africa. Despite its suggestive title and its extended apologetical attacks on the Earthly City, the City of God i…Read more
  •  8
    Aristotle’s Methodology for Natural Science in Physics 1-2: a New Interpretation
    Journal of Ancient Philosophy 14 (2): 130-146. 2020.
    In this essay I will argue for an interpretation of the remarks of Physics 1.1 that both resolves some of the confusion surrounding the precise nature of methodology described there and shows how those remarks at 184a15-25 serve as important programmatic remarks besides, as they help in the structuring of books 1 and 2 of the Physics. I will argue that “what is clearer and more knowable to us” is what Aristotle goes on to describe in 1.2—namely, that nature exists and that natural things change—…Read more
  •  8
    Imagination and the Genealogy of Morals in the Appendix to Spinoza’s Ethics 1
    International Philosophical Quarterly 62 (2): 211-224. 2022.
    The so-called “analytical” appendix to the first part of Spinoza’s Ethics has at times puzzled scholars. It notably breaks with the geometrical method adopted in most of the text, and includes an impassioned argument against teleology, popular morality, and, ultimately, the faculty of imagination. In this essay I seek to resolve this interpretive difficulty by side-by-side comparison with philosophical resources from one of Spinoza’s main influences. In particular, I argue that analysis of the a…Read more