Philosophy

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Philosophy - Faculty

John MacKinnon	MN532
Mark Mercer	MN524
Shelagh Crooks	MN526
Lisa Gannet	MN522
Chris MacDonald	MN523
Robert Ansell	MN530
Sheldon Wein	MN531
Sheila Kindred	MN529
Peter Heron	MN529
Carmel Forde	MN525
Todd Calder	MN525
Kathleen Jewell (Secretary)	MN508

Chairperson:

Dr. John E. MacKinnon
Associate Professor

Degrees: B.A. (Hons.) (McGill), M.A. (Toronto), M.Phil. (Exeter), Ph.D. (Cambridge)

Recent Courses Taught: Aesthetics: The Classical Tradition; Aesthetics: Contemporary Issues; Philosophy of Law; Ethics and the Law; Political Philosophy; Philosophy and Literature

Recent Publications: Review of Douglas Walton's Abductive Reasoning, in REVIEW OF METAPHYSICS 59 (2006); "Risk and Resilience in Catherine Bush's Minus Time," in THE JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE (2006); "Law and Tenderness in Bernhard Schlink's The Reader," LAW AND LITERATURE (2004); "Crime, Compassion, and The Reader," PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE (2003); "Aesthetic Supervenience: For and Against," BRITISH JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS (2001); "Heroism and Reversal: Sibley on Aesthetic Supervenience," in Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (eds.) AESTHETIC CONCEPTS: ESSAYS AFTER SIBLEY, Oxford (2001); "Scruton, Sibley, and Supervenience," JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM (2000); Review of Peter Kivy's Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance, in MIND 109 (2000).

john.mackinnon@smu.ca

Professor

Dr. Sheldon Wein

Degrees: B.A., M.A., Ph.D. (Waterloo)

Recent Courses Taught: Ethical Issues in International Development; International Justice; Critical Thinking; Philosophy of Law

Home Page: http://husky1.smu.ca/~swein/

sheldon.wein@gmail.com

Associate Professors

Dr. Shelagh Crooks

Degrees: B.A. (Hons.) (Saint Mary's), M.A. (Dalhousie), Ph.D. (Edinburgh)

shelagh.crooks@smu.ca

Dr. Lisa Gannett
Degrees: B.Sc. (UWO ), M.A. ( UWO), Ph.D. (UWO )

Recent Courses Taught: Philosophy of Science; Analytic Philosophy; Philosophical Issues in Feminism; Political Philosophy: The Classic Texts; The Empiricists; Environmental Ethics; Science and Society; Philosophy of Biology

Recent Publications: "Genes and Society," in OXFORD HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY (2007, edited by Michael Ruse); “Group Categories in Pharmacogenetics Research,” PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (2005); “Classical Genetics and the Geography of Genes” and “The ABO Blood Groups: Mapping the History and Geography of Genes in Homo sapiens” (co-authored by James R. Griesemer), in CLASSICAL GENETICS RESEARCH AND ITS LEGACY: THE MAPPING CULTURES OF TWENTIETH CENTURY GENETICS (2004; edited by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Jean-Paul Gaudillière; published by Routledge); “Making Populations: Bounding Genes in Space and in Time,” PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (2003); “The Normal Genome in Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Thought,” STUDIES IN HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGICAL AND BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES (2003); “Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of ‘Population Thinking,’” PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (2001); “What's in a Cause? The Pragmatic Dimensions of Genetic Explanations,” BIOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY (1999)

lisa.gannett@smu.ca

Dr. Chris MacDonald
Degrees: B.A. (Trent), M.A. (UBC), Ph.D. (UBC)

Recent Courses Taught: Business Ethics, Critical Thinking, Ethics & the Law

Home Page: http://www.ethicsweb.ca/aboutchris.html

Recent Publications: http://www.ethicsweb.ca/pubs.html

chris.macdonald@smu.ca

Dr. MacDonald is the Department's Graduate Program Coordinator

Dr. Mark Mercer

Degrees: B.A. (Hons.) (Carleton), M.A. (Carleton), Ph.D. (Toronto)

Recent Courses Taught: Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of Mind, Plato and the Presocratics

Recent Publications: " Folk Psychology's Epistemic Credentials," FACTA PHILOSOPHICA (2007); “Metaphor and Sentence Meaning,” FACTA PHILOSOPHICA (2006); "In Defence of Weak Psychological Egoism," ERKENNTNIS (2001); "Grounds of Liberal Tolerance," JOURNAL OF VALUE INQUIRY (1999); "Psychological Egoism and Its Critics," SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY (1998).

mark.mercer@smu.ca

Dr. Mercer is the Department's Undergraduate Advisor.

Assistant Professors

Dr. Robert N. Ansell
Degrees: B.A. (Cambridge), Ph.D. (Glasgow)

Recent Courses Taught: Human Freedom; Philosophies of Life; Business Ethics

Recent Publications: "The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Multinational Corporations in the Third World" (co-author: W.L. Archer), UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK LAW JOURNAL (1998)

robert.ansell@smu.ca

Part-Time Faculty

Dr. Carmel Forde
Degrees: B.A., M.A., Ph.D (York)
- teaches Critical Thinking; Introduction to Philosophy; Aesthetics; Kant's Theory of Knowledge; Symbolic Logic; Political Philosophy: Classic Texts; The Empiricists; Law, Justice, Morality and Existentialism; Philosophy of Human Nature and Ethics and the Law.

Dr. Peter Heron
Dergees: B.A. (McGill), M.A. (Brock), Ph.D (Ottawa)
- teaches Critical Thinking; Introduction to Philosophy; Ethics and the Law; Contemporary Political Philosophy; Late Modern Philosophy: Kant

Professor Sheila Kindred
Degrees: B.A. (UWO), M.A. (Toronto)
- teaches Critical Thinking; Bioethics.

Dr. Todd Calder

Degrees: B.A. (Hons.) (Dalhouse), M. A. (University of Calgary), Ph. D. (University of Western Ontario)

Recent Publications:

“Shared Responsibility, Global Justice, and Restitution,” Social Theory and Practice Vol. 36, No. 2 (April 2010), forthcoming.

“The Prevalence of Evil.” In Evil, Political Violence and Forgiveness (Lexington Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield Publishers), forthcoming 2009.

“Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?” American Philosophical Quarterly 44, No. 4 (Oct., 2007): pp. 371-381.

“Against Consequentialist Theories of Virtue and Vice.” Utilitas 19, No. 2 (June 2007): pp. 201-219.

“Kant and Degrees of Wrongness.” Journal of Value Inquiry 39 (2005): pp. 229-244.

Professors Emeriti

Dr. Wayne Grennan, E-Mail: wgrennan@eastlink.ca

Departmental Secretary

Kathleen Jewell

Phone (902) 420-5823. Email: kathleen.jewell@smu.ca