Offices (staff and faculty): 3d floor, MacKinnon Building [1], in the wing closest to the Library. How to find the Department of Philosophy [2]
Mail: Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Phone: (519) 824–4120 ×54253 or x56265
Current faculty (Emeritus and former faculty [3])
Our faculty are active in many areas of philosophical research. Some have formed research groups to further their research on connected topics:
Feminist Philosophy Research Group [4] Philosophy of Science Research Group [5] Political Philosophy Research Group [6]
Andrew Bailey [7], Associate Professor — Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics & Epistemology
Don Dedrick [8], Associate Professor (cross-appointed to the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Applied Cognitive Science [9]) — Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Psychology
Monique Deveaux [10], Professor, CRC in Ethics & Global Social Change — Political Philosophy, Ethics
Kenneth Dorter [11], Professor (retired but still active in teaching and research) — Ancient Philosophy, Eastern Philosophy
Peter Eardley [12], Associate Professor — Medieval Philosophy, Ethics
Karyn Freedman [13], Associate Professor — Epistemology, Feminist Philosophy
Maya Goldenberg [14], Associate Professor (cross-appointed to Bachelor of Arts and Sciences Program [15]) — Philosophy of Medicine, Feminist Philosophy of Science)
John Hacker-Wright [16], Associate Professor — Metaphysics of Value, Political Philosophy
Karen Houle [17], Professor — Political Philosophy, Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Stefan Linquist [18], Associate Professor — Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind
Mark McCullagh [19], Associate Professor and Department Chair — Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind
Omid A. Payrow Shabani [20], Professor — Social and Political Philosophy, Critical Theory
John Russon [21], Professor — Phenomenology, Ancient Philosophy
Patricia Sheridan [22], Associate Professor — Early Modern Philosophy, Early Modern Women Philosophers
Andrew Wayne [23], Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator — Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science
Karen Wendling [24], Associate Professor — Social and Political Philosophy, Ethics
Sessional Instructors (Winter 2017)
- Natalie Evans (natevans@uoguelph.ca [25])
- Casey Ford (fordc@uoguelph.ca [26])
- Jeannette Hicks (jhicks01@uoguelph.ca [27])
- Christopher Jordan-Stevens (cjordans@uoguelph.ca [28])
- John Lundy (lundy@uoguelph.ca [29])
- Aaron Massecar (amasseca@uoguelph.ca [30])
- Yussif Yakubu (yyakubu@uoguelph.ca [31])
Departmental support staff
Pam Armitage, Administrative Secretary to the Chair
Janet Thackray [32], Department/Graduate Secretary
Current MA students
Sofian Aouamri saouamri@mail.uoguelph.ca [33]
Yanis Aouamri yaouamri@mail.uoguelph.ca [34]
My main interests are located in Existentialism and Phenomenology. More specifically, I am exploring Albert Camus' thought and applying it to questions of personal identity and politics.
Mahdi Dadgarialamdari mdadgari@uoguelph.ca [35]
Generally my interest area is political philosophy but global justice and sustainable peace and development are my specific topics on which I want to work. These are some questions in my mind: Is sustainable global peace and justice achievable without having a kind of globalized governance? And if no, is it possible to think about such governance in this multicultural world? What is the starting point for reaching this goal? For analyzing these questions I will try contribute to the works of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and other great figures of the subject.
Thomas Doerksen tdoerkse@uoguelph.ca [36]
I am interested in the philosophy of science, including such topics as scientific explanation, scientific paradigms (à la Kuhn), and how science shapes metaphysics.
Sahand Farivar sfarivar@uoguelph.ca [37]
Michael Furac mfurac@mail.uoguelph.ca [38]
[to come]
Thomas Howell howellt@mail.uoguelph.ca [39]
I’ve been reading philosophers and fiction writers who deal with nature—Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze & Guattari, Coetzee—and generally want to get deeper into the history of philosophy.
Marian Kelly mkelly08@mail.uoguelph.ca [40]
My main areas of interest are in social and political philosophy, applied ethics and development ethics. More specifically, I am interested in poverty and inequality, social and economic policy, health equity and the social determinants of health. For my MA project, I am interested in investigating how societies ought to respond to changes taking place in the workplace and labour market in the 21st century, particularly related to increasing ‘casualization’ and ‘flexibilization’ of labour, economic restructuring and the rise of technological unemployment.
Mary King mking06@mail.uoguelph.ca [41]
My areas of interest are aesthetics and ethics. I am particularly interested in how they interact with the experience and production of space and spatiality. With these concepts in mind, I am specifically exploring the exclusion and alienation experienced by certain groups in artistic communities. I am considering theories from post-structuralism, urban/critical geography (Harvey, Massey) and critical theorists. Other significant people of interest for this project include Kant, Lefebvre, and Bourdieu.
Ritika Pal palr@uoguelph.ca [42]
My area of interest is philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I intend to conduct a detailed research on consciousness. I’m also looking into panpsychism as a viable theory of consciousness. Among others, the works of David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Christof Koch, William Seager and John Searle have piqued my interest. My second area of interest is ethics.
Josh Rosenberg jrosen01@mail.uoguelph.ca [43]
Lucelle Schmitz lschmitz@uoguelph.ca [44]
My area of interest rests somewhere in between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of mind. My research intends to start with Edmund Husserl’s development of horizon as a pivot in order to locate the inner revolution fundamental in disclosing notions of perception, (self)consciousness, (inter)subjectivity, autonomy and interiority, all of which point to, or at least I suspect point to, profound qualities in determining humanness. Such research hopes to address twenty-first century questions such as: Is there still a value to a rising human population vis-à-vis the rapid growth of current technology? And/or Is humanness still a thing? Thinkers I engage with include (but are not limited to) Plato, Augustine of Hippo, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Etienne Gilson, Bernard Lonergan S.J., Kenneth L. Schmitz and David Chalmers.
Denis Tsarev dtsarev@uoguelph.ca [45]
I have two main areas of interests: 1) Classical liberal and enlightenment political philosophy, utilitarian ethics and philosophy of history (concepts of freedom, state of nature and social progress), (Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Hegel, Mill, Comte, Hayek, Nozick, Fukuyama etc.), and 2) scepticist empiricist epistemology and philosophy of mind, including Bacon, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, Schopenhauer and others.
James Vander Zaag jvande20@uoguelph.ca [46]
I am interested in the relationship between self and world, and the ways that they shape and constitute one another. To explore this relationship I’d like to draw from a range of thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Levinas.
Tiger Zheng tiger@uoguelph.ca [47]
My main research interest is moral philosophy, and, in particular, neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. I hope to explore a development of the theory that takes into consideration an interpretive aspect of virtue instantiation and how this may be influenced by our situated identities. I am also keenly interested in the application of the approach to applied areas; especially environmental and medical ethics.
Current PhD Students
Brent Ables bables@uoguelph.ca [48]
My primary research interests are German Idealism and poststructuralism. I'm specifically interested in Deleuze's thought insofar as it both challenges and offers an alternative to Hegel's Logic. Ancient Greek thought is a secondary interest.
Shannon Buckley sbuckley@uoguelph.ca [49]
My research looks at the concept of dignity and how it is used, misused, understood and misunderstood in the health care context. I am particularly interested in how respect for dignity occurs (or does not occur) in the context of relationships such as the nurse-patient relationship. The term dignity is used in many different contexts, for example it is used in most human rights documents, yet exactly what dignity is and where it comes from and why we have it is poorly theorized.
Thomas Campbell tcampb07@uoguelph.ca [50]
Orsolya Csaszar ocsaszar@uoguelph.ca [51]
I am working on a feminist philosophy of science project. My supervisor is Prof. Karen Houle, and my second reader is Prof. Stefan Linquist. My thesis takes a critical feminist lens to explanations of human rape behaviours, more specifically with regards to evolutionary explanations. In my research, I am appealing to Foucault's archaeological method in order to analyze evolutionary textbooks. My aim is to demonstrate how these explanations contribute to, and propagate, rape culture.
Rachel Elliott rellio02@uoguelph.ca [52]
My interests are in the relationship between body language/gesture and music. I'm looking into the way that our everyday embodied habits influence our experience of music and vice versa. I want to understand temporal arts like music as also containing spatial and visual dimensions. I wonder where the body is in music that involves "new technologies": they tend to streamline the process of music making and reception such that the body might seem to disappear altogether. I'm also excited about the idea of a collective body, and related questions about psychic investment and identification.
Cameron Fioret fioretc@uoguelph.ca [53]
My research interests concern applied ethics and political philosophy. Specifically, I’m interested in issues of ownership and property, commodification, and distributive justice concerning natural resources. Should naturally occurring necessities for life, like water, be considered common property and commonly owned? Is it impermissible to commodify water? What is the most efficient, yet just, form of ownership of natural necessities? Such questions are the aim of my research.
Vedran Grahovac vgrahova@uoguelph.ca [54]
I work on the strategy of circularity in Husserl, with the special focus on Logical Investigations and Husserl’s treatment of time and judgment in his late writings. I suggest that the strategy of circularity can be traced throughout Husserl’s corpus and it provides us with the possibility for the new understanding of Husserl’s relation with his early and late critics. My interest also lies in the exploration of the methodological proximity between Husserl and the authors such as Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Patočka, and the similarity between Husserl’s and Kant’s treatment of categoriality and ideal lawfulness. I am co-editor of and contributor to The Subject(s)of Phenomenology: New Approaches to Husserl with Iulian Apostolescu and Philippe Haensler (forthcoming for Springer, March 2017, in Contributions to Phenomenology series) and I was director and an organizer of the conference “Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition” together with Jeff Mitscherling and Aaron Massecar (/arts/philosophy/events/2014/husserl_conference [55]).
Joshua Grant-Young jgrantyo@uoguelph.ca [56]
My primary research interests include: built-environments (biodomes, aquariums), architectural theory & post-Nature environmental philosophy. My secondary interests (broadly) include: aesthetics, Philosophy of Science, place-based ethics, political theory & posthumanism.
Daniel Griffin griffind@uoguelph.ca [57]
My research interests include German Idealism (especially Hegel), philosophy of language, and philosophical methodology.
Doug Halls dhalls@uoguelph.ca [58]
My research areas are Phenomenology, philosophy of nature and animality, philosophy of history and ancient philosophy.
Jeannette Hicks jhicks01@uoguelph.ca [27]
My work is situated at the intersection of philosophical aesthetics and contemporary art. My current research explores the implicit historicity of artistic practice sustained by the concept of the avant-garde, with particular attention to the discourse of critical rupture and political emancipation in contemporary participatory art and social practice. Key thinkers include Foucault, Ranciere, and Merleau-Ponty.
Kyle Johnston kjohns32@uoguelph.ca [59]
Christopher Jordan-Stevens cjordans@uoguelph.ca [28]
I am interested in developing a realistic idealism, which rejects the dualistic notions of "extra-mental" and "mental." I will argue that the formal structures of the world and the mind are the same; nature and thought are both rationally informed. In this respect, thought contains, in itself, the conditions for understanding and knowing all possible worlds.
Marie-Pier Lemay mlemay01@uoguelph.ca [60]
I am undertaking a collaborative PhD program with the International Development Studies department and I work at the intersection of feminist philosophy, development studies, and global justice literature. I aim to write my dissertation on empowerment and solidarity through a feminist lens. I am also very interested in theories focusing on the capabilities approach, multiculturalism, and feminist moral psychology (e.g. agency and adaptive preferences).
Veronica Majewski majewski@uoguelph.ca [61]
My research examines the way(s) in which the role of listening is absent or under-theorized in deliberative democratic theory, the harms caused by its absence, and whether giving listening a central role in political life can help deliberative democracy respond to the concerns on its critics.
April Marratto amarratt@uoguelph.ca [62]
Pat McHugh imchugh@uoguelph.ca [63]
I work mainly in metaphysics and the philosophy of nature, with concentrations on dialectical logic, anthropic and teleological problems, natural theology, the nature(s) of time and space, the nature of quantum collapse and the (possible) reciprocal relation of it and experience/consciousness, asymmetrical versus symmetrical systems and relations, and the works of G.W.F. Hegel, A.N. Whitehead, G. Deleuze, C. Hartshorne, W. James, C.S. Peirce, J. Royce, Spinoza, Leibniz, E. Harris, and Plato.
Robert Minatel rminatel@uoguelph.ca [64]
[to come]
Kyle Novak knovak@uoguelph.ca [65]
My focus will be in continental political thought. More specifically, I’m interested in questions about political subjectivity especially in relation to existing and possible democratic systems. Subfields I want to continue to research include phenomenology, critical theory, and biopolitics.
Rebecca Olivier rolivier@uoguelph.ca [66]
I am studying conflicting concepts of empathy in neuroscience, contemporary ethics, and eighteenth century thought.
Ilknur Ozalli iozalli@uoguelph.ca [67]
My study explores the inter-subjective act in ethical philosophy. I want to understand how our state of minds and our daily habits influence our experience of ethical expectations from others. I mainly focus on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas.
Patricia Pajunen ppajunen@uoguelph.ca [68]
My main areas of interest are Philosophy of Mind and Stoicism. However, my plan is to further develop and broaden my MA research essay on active hoping. How active hoping is promoted and used in medical, psychological, and political discourse influences physical and mental care as well as legislation. Doctor-assisted death as well as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report and Recommendations are two big topics I would like to look at through the lens of hope. I have two broad questions that I plan to explore possible answers to: How does active hoping help and how does active hoping hinder?
Bryan Richard bricha09@uoguelph.ca [69]
My philosophical work is sustained by the basic phenomenological/existential conviction that the meaningful individual human life is always more than itself. To riff off the great Miles Davis, it seems one is always called on to 'play what's not there.' I am primarily concerned with how this can be rationally articulated at the intersection of metaphysical and moral questions. To do this, I draw on the Ancients (who saw that such a task cannot be divorced from how you live), Hegel and Heidegger (who teach me to see connections), and Kant (from whom I learn the philosophical importance of carefully drawn dividing lines).
Curtis Robinson crobin08@uoguelph.ca [70]
Christina Storfa mstorfa@uoguelph.ca [71]
