Baylor University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2014
APA Eastern Division
Bexley, Ohio, United States
Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy
  • Reflective Pedagogy Community of Practice: Engaging Faculty and Staff in Reflective Pedagogy to Prepare for ePortfolio Launch
    with Andrea Karkowski, Tristen Davis, Carmen Dixon, and Linda Wolf
    Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice 23 (15): 1-10. 2023.
  •  6
    Disability and American Philosophies (edited book)
    Routledge. 2022.
    Given basic commitments to philosophize from lived experience and a shared underlying meliorist impulse, American philosophical traditions seem well-suited to develop nascent philosophical engagement with disability studies. To date, however, there have been few efforts to facilitate research at the intersections of American philosophy and disability studies. This volume of essays seeks to offer some directions for propelling this inquiry. Scholars working in pragmatist and other American tradit…Read more
  •  2
    Remembrance for Stuart Rosenbaum
    The Pluralist 17 (1): 125-127. 2022.
    stuart rosenbaum passed on December 14, 2020. A longtime member of SAAP and leader in other societies, he was well-known to many of us and will be fondly remembered for his kindness, his quiet humor, his insight, and his support of this community. He was a loving father and grandfather who will be deeply missed. For me, he was a mentor with unceasing generosity.Stuart transformed Baylor University’s Philosophy Department by designing and launching the PhD program. In the years before, he had bee…Read more
  •  41
    even a brief review of disability narratives shows that many people with disabilities, encompassing a diverse range of impairments, encounter disruptions in their everyday interactions. Individuals with disabilities report that strangers and neighbors alike fail to communicate with them.1 Instead, people defer to friends, partners, and caretakers to offer some command over the interaction. These experiences might be understood as mere annoyances, part of the experience of impairment insofar as i…Read more
  •  40
    Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values (review)
    Education and Culture 29 (1): 125-129. 2013.
    In his recent book, Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values, Hugh McDonald wades into the murky waters of value theory in order to develop a uniquely pragmatist theory of value. He ties value to what he calls "creative actualizations," or the process of introducing novelties, conditions, norms and principles into our individual and collective experience. Creative actualization accommodates a plurality of independent values, resisting the temptation to embrace a monist framework, whe…Read more
  •  47
    Moral particularism, broadly understood, is the position that morality resists codification into a set of rules or principles.1 Jonathan Dancy, particularism's main contemporary proponent, maintains that there are few, if any, true moral principles, and moral reasoning and judgment do not require them. Instead, acts are justified by the salient features of particular situations, and moral reasoning requires attunement to these elements. In rejecting a rule-bound approach to morality, particulari…Read more
  •  402
    Moral Particularism and the Role of Imaginary Cases: A Pragmatist Approach
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 8 (1): 237-259. 2016.
    I argue that John Dewey’s analysis of imagination enables an account of learning from imaginary cases consistent with Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism. Moreover, this account provides a more robust account of learning from cases than Dancy’s own. Particularism is the position that there are no, or at most few, true moral principles, and that competent reasoning and judgment do not require them. On a particularist framework, one cannot infer from an imaginary case that because a feature has a…Read more
  •  570
    John Dewey and the Possibility of Particularist Moral Education
    Southwest Philosophy Review 32 (1): 215-224. 2016.
    John Dewey’s analyses of habit and tradition enable contemporary moral particularists to make sense of the possibility of moral education. Particularists deny that rules determine an act’s moral worth. Using Jonathan Dancy’s recent work, I present a particularist account of moral competence and call attention to a lacuna in particularism: an account of education. For Dancy, reasoning requires attunement to a situation’s salient features. Dewey’s account of habit explains how features can exhibit…Read more