Student Fellows

Danny Damian isn’t easy to describe. He grew up in Carbondale and attended SIU and then the University of New Orleans. He has a vivid interest in Jung’s theories of symbol and myth, and relating these to popular culture and contemporary life. The Red Book has been an object of close study for him, and his ideas about it and the experience of “active imagination” have been part of some exercises he is developing on his own. He worked with WSIU’s Alt News program for PBS. He was co-leader of the AIPCT study of Jung’s Red Book December 2018-January 2019, and studied recently in Kyoto, Japan (late May through early July, 2019). Danny is a professional photographer and videographer with many thousands of followers on social media.

Robert Fiedler is a Ph.D. student in communication studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He completed both his B.A. (2009) and M.A. (2015) in philosophy from SIUC, with a thesis on Bergson, the idea of “person,” embodied experience, and time. His interests lie at an intersection of history, philosophy, communication, and creativity. He has taught at the college level in the Quad Cities in the areas of general and applied ethics, comparative religions, history of philosophy, and oral communication. His 2015 paper, “Self and Person: Distinctions in Bergson,” was published as a chapter to In the Sphere of the Personal: New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Persons (Vernon Press, 2016)

Danica Jenck is an M.A. student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She earned her B.A. in Philosophy and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies from Eastern Washington University June 2021, graduating with the Dean’s Student Excellence Award for the College of Arts, Letters, and Education and the Frances B. Huston Medallion Award. She has presented at undergraduate and national conferences on research focused in Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, American Philosophy, and culture. She is in residence at AIPCT as a research assistant for the foreseeable future.

Christian Murray completes his MA this spring in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi, where he has also worked as a Library Student Assistant in Metadata and Digital Initiatives. Christian has received a prestigious fellowship to continue his studies at the Ph.D. level at the University of Michigan beginning fall 2024. He received a BA in Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (2021), pursuing Intellectual History and the Digital Humanities. During the first few years of his undergrad, and from his own energies, he created the Founders Club. This digital project studies the ideas and events surrounding the framing of the American republic in order to create short video essays for public education. The Founders Club has partnered with the AIPCT to create a new series on the Roots of American Political Thought.

Leslie M. Murray is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His M.A. in philosophy was completed in spring 2018 with a thesis on the philosophical ideas of Gifford Pinchot on conservation, democracy, and ecological flourishing. He was a recipient of the prestigious McNair Fellowship as an undergraduate at SIUC with a thesis on the philosophical principles of evolution, general relativity, and time. He has presented papers at several national and international meetings and has published a translation (with Randall Auxier) of Bruno Latour’s “What Will You Gain If You Save Your Soul but Lose the Earth?” in Philosophy without Borders. He was a resident scholar of AIPCT from November 2021 until March 2022 working on a dissertation tentatively entitled: “The Dislocation of Persons: A Systematic Narrative Ontology.”

Fellows

Marc M. Anderson is a Canadian philosopher. He is a post-doctoral researcher for the Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications, at the Université de Lorraine in Nancy, France. His research is part of the EU Horizon2020 (AI-PROFICIENT) project,where recently he is co-author (with Karën Fort) of “Human Where? A New Scale Defining Human Involvement with Technology Communities from and Ethical Standpoint” (International Review of Information Ethics, vol. 31, 2022). Marc’s PhD in philosophy (2011) is from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain), Belgium. His long-term philosophical project, “Hyperthematics,” shows how value is realized and destroyed in experience, and how it can be deliberately created. Related interests include the application of the above to peace and conflict, including an article entitled “Building the Great Community: Assessing Josiah Royce’s War Insurance Proposal in Light of the Collective Security Ideal of the League of Nations and the UN,” Canadian Military Journal (2016). Three articles on value in a military context appeared in The Pluralist. His book Hyperthematics was published by State University of New York Press in 2019.

John W. August III is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan. He took his B.A. from Drake University, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, all in philosophy. He has been a visiting professor at Western Carolina University, Appalachian State University, and a Visiting Instructor at Rhodes College, Memphis, TN. During his most recent residence at AIPCT, he worked on a project he calls “New Dignity,” combining Kant’s personalism with Enrique Dussel’s ideas about “proximity.” He was the AIPCT resident fellow for fall 2020. He assists AIPCT with the website and technical issues in addition to periodic visits for research. He led the AIPCT reading group on Bergson in the fall of 2020.

Paul Benjamin Cherlin specializes in classical American Philosophy and German Idealism. He publishes primarily in the area of early Americanist metaphysics, and is currently writing a book that explicates and expands upon the naturalistic metaphysics of John Dewey. He is a founding member and chief editor of Dewey Studies, and an editor for The Journal of School & Society. Dr. Cherlin holds degrees from The University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, and Southern Illinois University (2017). He is currently a Lecturer in Philosophy at Minneapolis College. An AIPCT lecture is here.

Odessa Katrina Colombo is a professional philosophical coach, certified well-being coach and independent scholar. She earned her B.A. in philosophy (2008) and M.A. in philosophy (2011) from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her research interests include classical American Philosophy (James and Santayana), history of philosophy, philosophy of faith, cross-cultural philosophy and metaphysics. Currently, her research focuses on the epistemology of faith. She holds a well-being coach certification (2014) from the Anthropedia foundation. She practices in St. Louis, Missouri and Southern Illinois area. She led the AIPCT reading group on Women Who Run with the Wolves in Spring 2019.

Cornelius Crane is an XY model bi-pedal muscle-reflex device with a 3lb, slightly alkaline, electro-chemical central processor. He’s a space traveler with 59 revolutions around the Sun under his belt during his time aboard Spaceship Earth. He’s a formally trained auto mechanic, which laid the foundation for his auto-didactic approach to complex systems, cybernetics, linguistics, and philosophy. In the early 1990s, while working on his technical studies degree at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he was serendipitously gifted the book Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller. It was a watershed moment in his life. Over the next few years he traveled across the US in his 1971 VW Westfalia with his dog, Amigo, reading all of the works of Bucky Fuller and seeking anyone who might offer further insight into the concepts and ideas. He found the work of Stafford Beer and the recently developed Team Syntegrity: Syntegration Protocol, which utilized the structural stability of Fuller’s geometry to create an ephemeral “container” for a dynamic group process. He volunteered his time with the Toronto based Team Syntegrity as they put on a run of early Syntegrations. In 2002 he helped form the RBF Dome not-for-profit organization with a plan to save and preserve the Fuller Geodesic Dome Home in Carbondale, IL. He was President of the RBF Dome NFP organization for seven years. In 2016 Cornelius received a Master’s Degree in Linguistics from SIUC. He and his wife live in Murphysboro, IL where they enjoy beautiful Southern Illinois with their three dogs. He led the AIPCT reading group on Buckminster Fuller in fall 2019.

Matthew Z. Donnelly completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in fall 2018. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame (2007), and an M.A. in philosophy from Boston College (2013). He studies the philosophy of time and his dissertation defended the idea that time is nonlinear. His areas of specialty include metaphysics, ontology, continental philosophy, and the philosophy of language. Matthew’s philosophical method is aggressively pluralistic, bringing disparate philosophical traditions and perspectives into conversation. He lives in Paducah, KY, and teaches at John A. Logan College in Carterville, Illinois. An AIPCT lecture is here.

Nicholas L. Guardiano is Alwin C. Carus Archivist and Professor of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His Ph.D. was earned at SIUC in 2014. He writes on the philosophy of nature, Transcendentalism, the Hudson River School, and other American philosophers and artists. He is author of the book Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting (Lexington Books, 2017).

Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Georgia, focusing on emerging language variation, with interest in the philosophy of science. She serves as Associate Dean of Morris Library’s Special Collections Research Center at Southern Illinois University, an international destination for research in American Philosophy, featuring the records of the Open Court Publishing Company, the Foundation for Philosophy of Creativity, the Library of Living Philosophers, and the papers of John Dewey, among many others.

Sabrina Hardenbergh took her BA at the University of Wisconsin and her MA and Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts. Her field work was done in Madagascar among other places. She taught at Appalachian State University, University of Georgia, Davidson College, and University of North Carolina Asheville. Sabrina has been an activist in the Carbondale area for many years. She has contributed research and expertise to many environmental and progressive social causes, including managing a congressional campaign. She led the 2023 fall reading group on David Graeber’s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.

Caleb Ingram teaches philosophy at Rend Lake and Shawnee Community College and is the worship minister at Third Baptist Church Marion. He received a B.A. in both English Literature and Philosophy and an M.A. in Philosophy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research includes American philosophies of religions, including figures like James, Royce, and Santayana, the intersection between poetry, religion, and philosophy, gravitating toward the Counter-Enlightenment and Romantic Movement, and the poetic and religious imagination, more generally. Along with this research, Caleb is a practicing songwriter and poet currently working on his own collection of poetry and short stories as well as an L.P. of original music.

Myron M. Jackson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Western Carolina University. He previously held the Besl Chair of Ethics, Religion, and Society at Xavier University in Cincinnati, and also taught at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He specializes in process and continental philosophical traditions and philosophical anthropology. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His current research focuses on ironic relations at the heart of American exceptionalism, along with the influence of European pragmatism in the works of Peter Sloterdijk and Bruno Latour. He was resident fellow for the summer of 2021, May 15 to August 1. He has given two AIPCT lectures here and here.

Jared Kemling is a tenure-track faculty member at Rend Lake College where he teaches Philosophy. Jared received his PhD in 2018 from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, writing a dissertation on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and the idea of the person. His research interests are in German Idealism, Process Philosophy, Philosophical Anthropology, Philosophy of Culture, and American Pragmatism. He is an editor for the journals Dewey Studies and Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy of Culture. His current project is an edited volume forthcoming from SUNY press entitled The Cultural Power of Personal Objects: Traditional Accounts and New Perspectives (2021). He is co-editor (with Auxier) of Queen and Philosophy: Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind (2023). An AIPCT lecture is here. An article about Jared is here.

Eli Orner Kramer is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wrocław in Poland. He is author of Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume 1: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (Brill 2021). His Ph.D. in philosophy was completed in 2018 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His work has appeared in journals such as the Philosophy of Education Yearbook, The Journal of School and Society, and others. He co-edited the volume Philosophical Proposals for the University: Toward a Philosophy of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and is co-editor of the Philosophy as a Way of Life Book Series for Brill. His research interests include American and European Idealism, Early American Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Process Philosophy, and Metaethics. He is review and discussion section editor for Eidos. An AIPCT Lecture is here.

Cheongho Lee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy Education at Sangmyung University in Seoul, South Korea. Previously he was visiting professor at Sejong University, also in Seoul. His second Ph.D. in philosophy was completed in 2018 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He holds a B.A., M.A. and PhD in ethics education from the Seoul National University. His quest for normativity led him into the writings of Charles S. Peirce, convinced that reading Peirce would advance his lifetime study about the source of value and the connection between theory and practice. He investigates the relationship between knowledge and the normativity in Peirce’s theory and also in American pragmatic tradition, including Josiah Royce and C.I. Lewis. He designed the AIPCT website and continues to assist with it.

Natalie Long. Natalie is a native of the U.S. Midwest. After attending Saint Louis University for her undergraduate degree, she graduated from DePaul University College of Law, and currently practices environmental law in Springfield, Illinois. Over the past decade, she has lived in Chiapas and Guanajuato, Mexico, and studied in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, Uruguay, and Argentina. Her experiences in Latin America leave her hopeful that – despite a tendency toward the contrary – humanity might some day come close to fulfilling the promise encapsulated in the phrase: “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.” She led the summer reading group at AIPCT in 2020 on Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestisa.

Laura J. Mueller is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Texas A&M University. She taught previously at Gustavus Adolphus College and Luther College. She teaches courses in ethics, social and political philosophy, history of philosophy, American Philosophy, feminism, and philosophy of culture. Her past research focused primarily on Kant’s ideas about sensus communis, emphasizing the role of pre-cognitive aesthetics in ethics and epistemology. Recent projects include personalism and animals, and Kant and mental illness. She is also interested in matriarchal theory and philosophy of symbolism. Laura serves on the Editorial Board of Eidos: A Journal of the Philosophy of Culture, and edited its recent issue on Physical Culture.

Anthony Sean Neal is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion and a Faculty Fellow in the Shackouls Honors College of Mississippi State University. He is a 2019 inductee into the Morehouse College Collegium of Scholars. Dr. Neal received his doctorate in Humanities from Clark Atlanta University. He also received his Master of Divinity degree from Mercer University and a Bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College. Dr. Neal is the author of two books, Common Ground: A Comparison of the Idea of Consciousness in the Writings of Howard Thurman and Huey Newton (Africa World Press, 2015). The second is entitled, Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism: Love Against Fragmentation (Lexington, 2019). He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Library of Living Philosophers. He led the spring 2022 reading group African American Philosophy as Africana Studies.

Diana Prokofyeva is assistant professor at the department of Philosophy St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University in Russia. Her Ph.D. thesis was completed in 2012 at Bakshir State University, Ufa, Russia, in the field of social philosophy with the title “The Dialectic of Estrangement and Engagement: The Social-philosophical Aspects.” She joined the Phenomenology Research Center from the fall 2018 through the spring of 2019, and did a research in the fields of Personalism, Existentialism, and Phenomenology, with a focus on the problems of a Persona and human being, philosophical anthropology, and humanistic sociology, Marxism, Neo-Marxism, and Critical Theory. She has guided two previous seminars in recent years at AIPCT, and has co-hosted several events. She co-edited the selected proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Persons, Person: Encounters, Paradigms, Commitment and Applications, a collection of papers from the 15^th International Conference on Persons (in Israel, August 2019), eds. Diana Prokofyeva and Colin Patterson (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2023). A previous AIPCT lecture is here.

Brian J. Stanfield is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at John A. Logan College, Carterville, Illinois. His research interests include the history of American thought, especially Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and process philosophy, especially Whitehead. His MA is in American Studies from Northwest Missouri State University, with a thesis on The Folk Process, as conceived and explained by Pete Seeger and other practitioners of folk music. Brian is currently writing a dissertation on the idea of genius in the philosophy of Emerson.

Photo by Mindy Friedman

Megan Volpert is a frequent contributor to PopMatters and an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University, where she specializes in Gender and Americana. She earned an MFA from Louisiana State University and has written or edited over dozen books on popular culture, including Perfume: Object Lessons (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Closet Cases: Queers on What We Wear (Et Alia, 2020), and Boss Broad (Sibling Rivalry, 2019). Her awards include Georgia Author of the Year, Teacher of the Year, two Lambda Literary finalists and an American Library Association honoree. Volpert’s philosophical pursuits as a cultural critic run the gamut from high to low in music, television and fashion, usually emphasizing her queerness at some intersection with existentialism, psychoanalysis, or performativity. She was be in residence at AIPCT in July of 2022 (virtually due to COVID), presenting one of the Hahn Lectures and a Residency Lecture. She led the Feminist Manifestos reading group, summer 2022.

Current Resident Fellows

Danica Jenck is in residence. See bio above under Student Fellows.

Past Resident Fellows

Mikołaj Wiśniewski took his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Warsaw and is Professor habil. of American literature and history at Universytet SWPS Warsaw (the University of Social Sciences and Humanities) in Poland. He is the author of New York and Its Vicinities: The Work of James Schuyler (published by the Polish Academy of Sciences) and is the editor of the Polish editions of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Typee and (together with Adam Lipszyc) Melville’s Short Stories and Novellas (published by the State Publishing Institute PIW). He was in residence for the month of September, 2022.

Marcin Rychter is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. He first came to AIPCT as part of a faculty exchange between SIU Carbondale and the University of Warsaw and was in residence from mid-August until early October, 2019, at AIPCT. His residency lecture is here. He was in residence again for the month of September in 2022. Dr. Rychter specializes in the philosophy of music, phenomenology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture. He also translates important work from English to Polish, including Alfred North Whitehead and scholarship on process thought for the journal Kronos: Metafysika, Kultura, Religia (2017, Number 1).

Samuel Maruszewski is a Ph. D. student in Philosophy at the University of Wrocław, Poland. He received his B.A. (2016) and M.A. (2018) in Cultural Studies at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań. He received his second M.A. in Philosophy (2020) also at Adam Mickiewicz University, where he graduated with distinction, his thesis concerning transformations of contemporary mind as a consequence of technicization of culture. His interests include philosophy of culture, philosophy as a way of life, and philosophy of mind.He is currently working on a dissertation proposal on self-knowledge and the further development of Cassirer’s paradigm for humanistic phenomenology of culture. He was in residence at AIPCT during August of 2022.

Gioia Laura Iannilli is the recipient of an Alwin C. Carus Research Fellowship from the Morris Library at SIUC for the summer of 2022. She is in residence at AIPCT for June and July. Iannilli was also the William S. Minor Dissertation Fellow for 2019, in residence at AIPCT June 1 to July 31, 2019. Her residency culminated with her public lecture, available here. She is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. She took her second PhD in Aesthetics at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Philosophical-Social Sciences). Her thesis addressed the modalities through which the implicit component of experience is constituted from a specifically aesthetic viewpoint. She also holds a PhD in Aesthetics from the University of Bologna (Architecture), and also an MA in Visual Arts and a BA in Philosophy. She has taught Aesthetics of Design at the University of Florence in collaboration with Tongji University (Shanghai). Her areas of expertise are Deweyan Aesthetics, Everyday  Aesthetics, Aesthetics of Design, Aesthetics of Fashion, Aesthetics of New Technologies. She has authored a book, L’estetico e il quotidiano: Design, Everyday Aesthetics, esperienza (2019) on these topics. She is currently book review editor of Studi di Estetica – Italian Journal of Aesthetics, and member of the editorial board of the “International Lexicon of Aesthetics.”

Paniel Reyes Cárdenas was awarded his MPhil and PhD in Philosophy by the University of Sheffield, UK, where he remains a Fellow. He researched the place of scholastic realism in Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy, supervised by Christopher Hookway and Steve Makin. He has published papers on the philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and German Idealism. Professor Reyes Cárdenas is also a founder of the Peirce Latin-American Society. After a spell as postdoctoral fellow in the University of Nottingham, he became lecturer and researcher at the People’s Autonomous University of Puebla State (Puebla, Mexico). Paniel is part of the Mexican Council of Science and Technology, awarded SNI 1 for his research work. He is the author of Scholastic Realism (Peter Lang, 2018) and Ideas in Development (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018). Paniel has been visiting presidential fellow at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio from 2021-2022, and is in residence at AIPCT for the second part of April, 2022.

Leslie M. Murray was in residence at AIPCT from October 2021 until March 2022. He was researching his dissertation. His residency lecture is here. Les is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His M.A. in philosophy was completed in spring 2018 with a thesis on the philosophical ideas of Gifford Pinchot on conservation, democracy, and ecological flourishing. He was a recipient of the prestigious McNair Fellowship as an undergraduate at SIUC with a thesis on the philosophical principles of evolution, general relativity, and time. He has presented papers at several national and international meetings and has published a translation (with Randall Auxier) of Bruno Latour’s “What Will You Gain If You Save Your Soul but Lose the Earth?” in Philosophy without Borders. He was a resident scholar of AIPCT from November 2021 until March 2022 working on a dissertation tentatively entitled: “The Dislocation of Persons: A Systematic Narrative Ontology.”

Helen Grela received a BS in International Economics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and an MS in International Finance from MIT‘s Sloan School of Management. She was also awarded a Fulbright research grant to the Warsaw School of Economics, where she examined the banking system under communism. Helen had a career in finance, first in corporate commercial banking in New York and Boston, and later in private equity finance in Warsaw. She started her philosophical studies only recently, enrolling in Roger Scruton’s masters level program for mature students at Buckingham University–London. She is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences, focusing on economic and monetary theory. In her dissertation, she is exploring how heterodox theories of money might impact Nozick’s libertarian position on distributive justice. Currently she is a Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School’s Program on the Study of Capitalism. She was in residence at AIPCT from May 2-21, 2021. Her residency lecture is here.

Jordan Kokot was the William S. Minor Fellow for 2020. Residency was adjusted for the pandemic. His residency lecture is here. Dr. Kokot defended his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Boston University in August 2022, with a dissertation on the Phenomenology of Time Consciousness in Art and Aesthetic Experience. His dissertation focused on the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the foundational relationship between aesthetic practices and the phenomenology of temporality.  In creating and appreciating works of art, we are inevitably and foundationally engaged in the practice of bringing time into focus for ourselves while also rebuilding the structures of our lived temporalities. Jordan also works and teaches in the phenomenology, aesthetics, and ethics of technology,  analyzing the deep connections between artificial intelligence and virtual reality. He is also a practicing artist and creative writer, presently focused on producing a curated multimodal volume called field|guide which is dedicated to exploring  the poetics of silence. You can learn more about Jordan here.

Orsola Iermano will be in residence for the month of March, 2020. She was born in Palermo (Italy) and now lives in Rome. She is a PhD student in Philosophy of Education at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Unfortunately the pandemic made a residency impossible. She is a teacher specializing in philosophy for children/community and a philosophical consultant. Her current research focuses on the topics of education and responsibility of judgment. She has completed post-graduate work at the Acuto School, the University of Salerno, the University of Naples “Federico II,” and the University of Florence. She is a certified teacher of philosophy for children by C.R.I.F. (Research Center on Philosophical Inquiry) in Rome. From 2012 to 2014 she attended a school in philosophical consultancy in Bologna, where she obtained certification as a Philosophic Consultant. In 2012 she obtained her master’s degree in Philosophy, with honors, from the University of Siena, with a thesis focused on the question of evil in twentieth-century philosophy. In particular she studied the question of evil in Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas and Luigi Pareyson, with an appendix on the Jungian interpretation of the Book of Job.

Jessica Pasca was in residence at AIPCT, February, 5 until March 9, 2020.Her residency lecture is here. She is a PhD student from the University of Palermo. She obtained a First Level Degree (bachelors) in educational sciences in 2015 dealing with the theme of new addictions and internet addiction. In 2017 she graduated with a Second Level Degree (masters) in pedagogical sciences with a thesis on John Dewey and intellectual education. In 2019 she started the Ph.D. in “Health Promotion and Cognitive Sciences,” also from the University of Palermo. Her research interests concern the history of education. Currently, her research is about John Dewey and education for reflective thinking. She has published a paper entitled “L’educazione intellettuale: il rapporto fra docenti e discenti nell’ottica di John Dewey,” in Pedagogia e Vita. She is also interested in the reception of Dewey’s works in Italy, with particular attention to the work done by Lamberto Borghi.

Beisecker

David Beisecker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was in residence at AIPCT for several months during the fall  and spring of 2018-19 as our resident fellow. His residency lecture is here. Dave served a full term as chair of Philosophy at UNLV between 2011 and 2017. His Ph.D. came from the University of Pittsburgh (1999) where he wrote a dissertation directed by Robert Brandom and developed an unnatural attachment to the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. He was among the group that founded the Sellars Society some years back. His long-term project on logic without appeals to truth functions and conditions is among the most provocative in philosophical logic today, employing a significant development of Peirce’s logic to loosen the borders of the region between thought, talk, and consciousness. His AIPCT residency lecture is here.

Przemysław Bursztyka is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, and chair of the Department of Philosophy of Culture. His main interests include philosophy of culture (including cultural studies) philosophical psychology, philosophy of human nature (especially apophatic anthropology) and philosophy of subjectivity, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur) and aesthetics (especially phenomenological). Currently he is working on the aesthetic and ethical (broadly understood) aspects of the work of imagination. Co-editor and co-author of three books: Schulz. Między mitem a filozofią (Gdańsk 2014), Freud i nowoczesność (Kraków 2007 and 2008), Miłość i samotność. Wokół myśli Sørena Kierkegaarda (Warszawa 2007). He is also the author of the numerous articles and co-founder and editor-in-chief of the philosophical quarterly Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture. He has been in residence at AIPCT periodically from 2015 to the present. An AIPCT lecture is here.

Claudio Paolucci is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Theory of Language at the Department of Philosphy and Communication of the University of Bologna, where he teaches Semiotics, Semiotics of audiovisual and musical languages, Philosophy of Language and Semiotics of Body and Perception. He is the scientific coordinator of the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities founded by Umberto Eco, in both Philosophy and Semiotics. He has published three books and more than 70 papers on international journals. His main work is Strutturalismo e interpretazione (Bompiani, 2010, 510 pp.). He was in residence during October, 2018. His Residency Lecture is here.

Jennifer Marra was the 2018 William S. Minor Dissertation Fellow sponsored by the Foundation for the Philosophy of Creativity, in residence from June 1 until August 1. She was a PhD Candidate at Marquette University, completing the degree in 2019. Her areas of specialization include German phenomenology, carceral studies, and the philosophy of humor. Her scholarship is influenced by the work of Angela Davis, Ernst Cassirer, Richard Pryor, and Carol Burnett. Her current project focuses on Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as a means of informing metaphysical and normative understandings of humor. She is currently serving her fourth term on the executive board of The Lighthearted Philosophers Society. Her residency lecture is here.

Thurman Todd Willison is a Ph.D. candidate at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. From August of 2016 until May of 2018 he was in residence at AIPCT and is currently writing a dissertation that examines interpretations of human dignity within personalist thought, interrogating the impact of varieties of 20th century personalism on how human dignity came to be defined in international moral discourse and providing a constructive account of how a viable personalist theory of dignity looks in light of contemporary ethical concerns.

Research Fellows

Robert De Filippis’ education has been geared toward business and psychology, with a specialization in management and organizational behavior. He is a graduate of SIU, DePaul University, Illinois Benedictine University, and is an ABD from the Union Graduate Institute in Cincinnati, OH. Bob retired in 2002 and began his final career as a writer. He is a local figure who hosts a weekly radio, Think Again, Please, show advocating deeper examination of current events and writes a weekly newspaper column for a regional news organization. He has published eight previous books on topics derived from his first book on personality trait theory from the point of view of the philosophy of language and examining the linguistic construction and development of the human personality. During his twenty-year writing career, he has also written over 800 published essays on religious-socio-political topics in the U.S. In his earlier career as an ontological coach, he focused on the deconstruction and reconstruction of ontological presuppositions with the use of psychometric testing tools to pinpoint specific areas of concern. He led the spring 2023 reading group on Consciousness and Near Death Experiences. Here is an interview with Bob.

Robin Friedman grew up in Milwaukee and received his BA in philosophy in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He earned a JD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and practiced law for nearly forty years. He has had a lifelong interest in philosophy with graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the American University. Following retirement in 2010, Robin intensified his interest in philosophy by presenting papers for the Josiah Royce Society, the APA, and the Metaphysical Society of America as well as by writing papers and reviews for The Pluralist, Dewey Studies, Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, Eidos, and Education and Culture. He also writes reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Robin’s philosophical interests include American philosophy, religious philosophy, and Spinoza. An AIPCT lecture is here.

Charles Herrman is Senior Research Fellow of AIPCT, and an independent scholar from Austin, Texas. He works extensively in formal ontology (especially with ideas in the vein of Peirce and Whitehead), axiology, the philosophy of history, law, and of culture, and also in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. He has published numerous scholarly articles across several disciplines. His work at the AIPCT has concerned civilizational structures of Honor and Dignity. He provided a seminar in cultural ontology in June 2017 based on a book manuscript he is refining. Some of his recent writing has covered these topics and others, including David Graeber’s contributions to economic and anthropological thought. Some of those writings are available here. He was in residence late July and early August 2023 and provided a seminar which will appear shortly on our YouTube channel.

Gary L. Herstein is a Senior Research Fellow at AIPCT, and an independent scholar and author. His Ph.D. in philosophy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (2005), an Interdisciplinary Masters degree from DePaul University, and a BA in philosophy from Occidental College. His interests include process philosophy, American philosophy, and the history and philosophies of mathematics and logic. He has taught at Merrimack College, Muskingum College, Harper Raney Junior College, and SIU Carbondale. He is author of Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology (Ontos 2006), and co-author of The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism. Now retired from formal modes of employment, he spends much of his time writing fiction — principally fantasy — in addition to his philosophical researches. A native Californian, he now keeps house in Southern Illinois with his two cats, who despair of him ever learning anything interesting. He has been in residence at AIPCT numerous times over the years and currently resides in Carbondale.

Xu Tao holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Peking University, China. He is now an associate professor of Philosophy at Central South University, China. He was a visiting scholar of the AIPCT from December 2017 to December 2018. He has published two books on Dewey research and three other books, and participated in the Chinese translation of the collected works of Dewey. His main research interests are the American pragmatism, especially Dewey’s philosophy and Classical Pragmatism. His work at the AIPCT carried out a wide range of philosophical studies based on pragmatism and naturalism, and he wrote some papers in English. In the next two years he also plans to write two Chinese books: The Development of Dewey’s Philosophical Thought and Political Philosophy from the Pragmatic Perspective.

Senior Fellows

Robert S. Corrington is Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Philosophical Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is author of many books in philosophy, theology, semiotics, psychology, and experimental autobiographical and auto-ethnographical studies. The annual international conference in ecstatic naturalism is dedicated to the study of Corrington’s ideas and the furthering of his kind of naturalism. As founder of the “ecstatic naturalism” movement, Corrington has integrated the ideas of historical and contemporary thinkers, from Plato, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer to Josiah Royce, C.S. Peirce, C.G. Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Justsus Buchler (among others) into a comprehensive and original perspective on all of the basic questions of being, non-being, and human experience.

Pete (A.Y.) Gunter founded the philosophy department at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas) in 1969. With Max Oelschlaeger he transformed the department there in 1986 into the nation’s first program in environmental philosophy. His books include Bergson and the Evolution of Physics (1969), The Big Thicket: A Challenge for Conservation (1972), Bergson and Modern Thought (1986), The Big Thicket: An Ecological Reconsideration (1986), Henri Bergson: A Bibliography (1974, 1986, now updated in Presses Universitaires de France online), Texas Land Ethics (1997), and Finding the Big Thicket: A Cartographic Approach (2016). Professor Gunter was instrumental in the creation and enlargement of the Big Thicker National Preserve, the first biological preserve in the history of the National Park Service and the first use stream corridors a fundamental to a park’s structure. He writes novels and has been caught composing music. His Hahn Lecture at AIPCT is here.

Louise (Lucy) W. Knight is an author, lecturer, and historian. She has written two biographies of Jane Addams: Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2005), about Addams’s formative years; the second book, the first full life biography of Addams in 37 years is Jane Addams: In Spirit and Action (W. W. Norton, 2010). Shifting her focus to the antebellum period, she is currently working on a book about the radical abolitionist-feminists, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, titled American Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké and the First Fight for Human Rights, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022. Knight’s writing have been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation website, CNN.com, and the Chicago Tribune. She lectures often at universities, historical societies. and academic conferences. She has appeared on public television, C-Span Book TV, and various radio stations. In her lectures, book talks, and other writings, she explores the connections between early and current progressive civic action. She is a long-time Visiting Scholar in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University,  currently serves in the board of Biographers International Organization (BIO) and is a former president of the Frances Willard Historical Association, which manages the historical site, Frances Willard’s home, in Evanston, Illinois. Her AIPCT Institute Lecture is here.

James McLachlan is professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at Western Carolina University. He has been co-founder and co-organizer of the Personalist Summer Seminar since 1996. He is co-founder and past co-chair of the Mormon Studies Group at the American Academy of Religion. He is co-chair Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminars and was co-director of the NEH Summer Seminar on Levinas at the University at Buffalo in 2017 and 2022. He is author and editor of several books including Persons, Institutions, and Trust Essays in Honor of Thomas O. Buford (Vernon Press, 2018). His recent research and publications have been on American Hegelianism, concepts of Hell in existentialism, demonic evil in Boehme, Schelling, and Dostoevsky, and the problem of evil in Mormonism.An AIPCT lecture is here.

Mark Moorman is an independent scholar. He graduated with a degree in philosophy from Bucknell University in 1983. He earned an MA in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1986, and in 1989 an M.Phil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. He edited and contributed to the book Commonplace Commitments: Thinking Through the Legacy of Joseph P. Fell, (Bucknell University Press, 2016), and published an article on Lucretius entitled, “Lucretius’ Venus and Mars Reconsidered,” (Lyceum, 2009). He has always, at some cost, had a broad interest in the history of philosophy generally. His more specific interests include idealism, in particular the philosophy of Josiah Royce, phenomenology, the philosophy of science, and Hellenistic philosophy.

Robert Cummings Neville is professor emeritus of philosophy, religion, and theology at Boston  University where he is also dean emeritus of the School of Theology and of Marsh Chapel. He is past president of the Charles S. Peirce Society, the American Academy of Religion, the Metaphysical Society of America, the International Society for Chinese Philosophy, and the Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought. He is the author of over 300 papers and nearly 30 books, notably the Axiology of Thinking trilogy Reconstruction of Thinking  (1981), Recovery of the Measure (1989), and Normative Cultures (1995). His recent Philosophical Theology trilogy consists of Ultimates (2013), Existence (2014), and Religion (2015). His most recent book is Defining Religion: Essays in Philosophical Theology (2018).The best part of most of his books are the covers the art for which has been created by the artist, Beth Neville, his wife.  His website is robertcummingsneville.com. An AIPCT lecture is here.

Kenneth W. Stikkers is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota and he served as secretary of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for over 25 years. He was chair at Seattle University and specializes in the philosophy of economics, of race, of social science, and classical American pragmatism. He is author of many articles in the philosophy of economics, and he is co-editor of Philosophy in a Time of Economic Crisis (Routledge, 2017). He was the Hahn Lecturer for AIPCT in 2019. His lecture is here.