Teaching Page
I teach a wide range of classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I enjoy teaching most areas of philosophy, especially those areas that *I* want to learn more about. (Sometimes the best way to learn something is to figure out how you would teach it to someone else.)
Below is a list of all the classes for which I was the primary instructor or, in the case of co-taught classes, one of the primary instructors. Many of these classes I have taught more than once.
At Notre Dame:
Undergraduate classes
Introduction to Philosophy
Freshman University Seminar
Topics in Metaphysics (Time, Material Constitution, Modality, Existence)
Early Modern Philosophy
The Philosophy of Edith Stein
Graduate classes
Graduate Proseminar
Being and Non-Being, Then and Now (co-taught with Sam Newlands)
Monism
Edith Stein
The Metaphysics of You and I
At Syracuse University:
Undergraduate classes
Six Myths about the Good Life
Honors Introduction to Philosophy
British Empiricism
20th Century Theories of Knowledge and Reality
Philosophy of Religion
Truth and Truthmakers
Topics in Metaphysics
Meta-Ethics
Metaphysics
Graduate classes
History of the A Priori
Early 20th Century Philosophy
Metaphysics
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Proseminar: Language, Epistemology, Mind, Metaphysics
Husserl’s Logical Investigations
Leibniz: Substance, Modality, Causation (co-taught with Kara Richardson)
Descartes’ Metaphysics (co-taught with Kara Richardson)
Parts and Wholes
The Metaphysics of Ethics (co-taught with Ben Bradley)
Hyper-Intensionality
Modality
Properties
Essence and Potentiality
Parfit’s Reasons and Persons (co-taught with Ben Bradley)
Foundations of Analytic Ethics (co-taught with Ben Bradley)
Existence
At the University of Massachusetts-Amherst:
Undergraduate classes
Introduction to Philosophy
Introduction to Symbolic Logic
Introduction to Ethics
Medical Ethics
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Philosophy of Religion
As the list above indicates, I have taught a wide variety of metaphysics classes both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as many classes in history of philosophy and ethics (including meta-ethics).
In addition to the classes I have taught, I have a “teaching bucket list”, consisting mostly of classes in the history of philosophy. (The class on Leibniz, co-taught with Kara Richardson, and the class on Husserl’s Logical Investigations were previously on that list.) I am very interested in late 19th century / early 20th century philosophy; I would love to teach a survey class on early figures in the phenomenological tradition, such as Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Stein, Reinach, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, Heidegger. I’d also be interested in a survey course on “British” idealism, which would cover people like Bradley, McTaggart, Calkins, Bosanquet, Royce. Finally, at some point, I’d like to develop a course on non-western metaphysics; I’ve had some success teaching some Buddhist philosophy in my philosophy of religion courses, and it is a research interest of mine.