It's one of those deep joys only runners understand. We play a lot of video games and do general fun stuff together. You'll hear far too much about my sons in class. As I update this, one of my boys are 5 and the other is 8. Also, one thing I've come to appreciate is that learning subjects that we are interested in for the sake of teaching the material might be the BEST experience for true lifelong learners.Ĭhilling out with my two little boys. Just this past Spring ('21) I attended a 16-week workshop by the Best Teachers Institute, and am ready to get my fingernails dirty building a supercourse (see Ken Bain's Supercourses). Also, I can ALWAYS grow as an instructor, and I'm constantly modifying my classes and looking to develop more classes. I also get to help facilitate critical thought about the all-important things in life, watching so many bright minds at work, even if the process of examined living isn't exactly a comfortable one. In the teaching experience, I get to spread the joy and intrinsic motivation that comes along with grasping insights, or at least new tensions between insights. I get to share everything that intersects my interests and relevant philosophy for students, and sprinkle the insights I've gathered along the way in my own humble quest for wisdom. In all of my interests, the concept, justification, and cultivation of philosophy for living seems to stand out as most important to me.Īlthough i'm a highly introverted guy, a really dig teaching. I find the ethical side to being a philosopher to be the most important for me. Philosophy offers the foundations of much of critical thinking-both ethically and in toolkits, and seeks justified belief and the nurturing of virtue in matters of knowledge, ethics, meaning in life, and those important metaphysical questions about the soul, God, etc. I like to think of philosophy as examined living on steroids, as long as we include both the critical AND creative side of philosophical inquiry. You'll see it flows through my veins and that I'm probably not suited for much else. Teaching it not only felt right from my first lecture in 2010, but helped to advance my pursuit to a more productive and helpful place, allowing philosophy to represent a larger part of me. Pursuing the world with a philosophical edge was an experience like "waking up" to me-a transformational one that I never left. It probably started with obsessions with "why" questions in my youth, distrust of appeals to authority and tradition in my young teens, some heavy existential crises, and gifts with logic and abstract thinking-all at a pretty young age. Why do I love philosophy? Well, I've been immersed in the subject since such a young age that it simply isn't a question that I could sufficiently answer. ![]() I've been blessed with two awards at Gannon University, both determined by students: The Excellence in Teaching award in 2015, and the Veritas in Caritate (Love in Truth) award in 2021. ![]() I was also a certified mathematics teacher (I stopped philosophy at the MA-level, and moved in that direction instead), and have done a bunch of other things. We met in graduate school back in DeKalb, Illinois, although all who know me can tell pretty quickly that I am originally from the East Coast. I moved here in 2009 with my wife Jessica Hartnett, due to her being hired here as a Psychology/ Applied Stats professor. ![]() I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at Gannon University, having a rocking time teaching philosophy.
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