Recent MA & PhD Defenses

PhD in Philosophy 2019

Justin Nordin, PhD

• Dissertation Title: A Levinasian Approach to Ethics
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Hanne Jacobs

David Atenasio, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Collective Responsibility by Agreement
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Thomas Carson

PhD in Philosophy 2018

Robert Duncan, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Homonymy and the Comparability of Goods in Aristotle
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Julie Ward

Sarah Babbitt, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Simple Goodness: Problematic Idealizations in Ethical Theory
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Jennifer Parks

Paul Leisen, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Hannah Arendt’s Political Action: a Dialectic of Expression and Deliberation
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Ingram

Nicoletta Ruane, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Three Conceptions of the Modern Inequality Paradox
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Schweickart

Kyoungnam Park, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Concept of Matter in Kant's Transcendental Idealism
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

Peter Omollo, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Paradox of African Subjectivity and its Ambiguous Relationship with Institutional Forms: Charles Taylor's Insights on "Expressivism" and Habermas' Deliberative Democracy
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Ingram

Daniele Manni, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Art of Morals: A Study of the Influence of Musicopoetic Arts on Moral Development in Plato's Laws
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Mark Waymack

Allan Breedlove, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Deepening the Hermeneutic of Suspicion: Habermas and Taylor on the Psychodynamics of Lifespan Moral Development
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Ingram

PhD in Philosophy 2017

Marcella Linn, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Character Luck and Moral Responsibility: The Character of the Ordinary Person in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Politics
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Thomas Carson

Ndidi Nwaneri, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Human Rights and Global Justice: A Normative Critique of Some Rawlsian Approaches
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Ingram

Sean Petranovich, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Husserl and Community
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Hanne Jacobs

Rebecca Scott, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Master and the Midwife: Levinas and Plato on Teaching
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Adriaan Peperzak

Giancarlo Tarantino, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Being Wise Before Wisdom: The Historical Development of Phronesis from Homer to Aristotle, and its Consequences for Hans-Georg Gadamer's Hermeneutic Ethics
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Adriaan Peperzak

PhD in Philosophy 2016

Asaf Bar-Tura, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Habermas and Public Reason in the Digital Age: Technology and Deliberative Democracy
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Ingram

Thomas Bretz, PhD

• Dissertation Title: “But Who, We?”: Derrida on Non-Human Others
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

Andrew Kondrat, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Moral Distress and the Health Care Organization
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Ozar

PhD in Philosophy 2015

Aaron Crowe, PhD

• Dissertation Title: International Trade: A Justice Approach
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Schweickart

Russell Newstadt, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Omnis Determinatio Est Negatio: Negation, Difference and the Unity of the Concept
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

Merritt Rehn-Debraal, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Surviving History of Sexuality: A Feminist-Foucauldian Approach to Sexual Violence and Survival
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

PhD in Philosophy 2014

Mark Bourgeois, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Function Debate in Philosophy of Biology: Proper Function as the Necessary Basis for Interpreting Systemic Organization
• Dissertation Director: Dr. James Blachowicz

Kristina Grob, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Moral Philosophy and the Art of Silence
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Mark Waymack

Bryan Kibbe, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Mindful Mending: The Repair of Thought and Action Amidst Technologies
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Diana Meyers

Maria Kulp, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Limits of Rationality: Suicidality, Affectivity, and the Rational
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Jennifer Parks

Maggie Labinski, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Augustine and Feminisms: A Dialogue about Education
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Victoria Wike

PhD in Philosophy 2013

Matthew Butcher, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Character and Role of Volitional Evidence in an Evidentialist Argument for the Existence of God
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Paul Moser

Matthew Kelsey, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Mother of Chaos and Night: Kant's Metaphilosophical Attack on Indifferentism
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

Gisele Velarde La Rosa, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Prolegomena to Kant's Theory of the Derangement of the Cognitive Faculties
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

PhD in Philosophy 2012

Alberto Bertozzi, PhD

• Dissertation Title: On Eros in Plotinus: Attempt at a Systematic Reconstruction (with a Preliminary Chapter on Plato)
  
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Adriaan Peperzak

Won Choi, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Structuralist Controversy: Althusser and Lacan on Ideology
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Andrew Cutrofello

Christina Drogalis, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Revolutionary Change: How Kant's Religion Influences His Account of Human Moral Development
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Victoria Wike

Justin Marquis, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Nietzsche's Theory of Cognition: An Interpretation and Defense of Perspectivism
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Jacqueline Scott

Blaine Swen, PhD

• Dissertation Title: The Logic of Divine-Human Reconciliation: A Critical Analysis of Penal Substitution as an Explanatory Feature of Atonement
• Dissertation Director: Dr. Paul Moser

Timothy Weidel, PhD

• Dissertation Title: Beyond Utility, Rights, and Care: An Alternative Approach to Global Poverty
• Dissertation Director: Dr. David Schweickart

MA in Philosophy

• James Egan, 2018
• Randi Feder, 2016
• Joel Stenftenagel, 2016

MA in Social Philosophy

• Chia-Yang Kao, 2019
• David Inczauskis, 2019
• Joseph Lorenz, 2019
• Michael Martinez, 2019
• Henoch Derbew, 2018
• Minh-Hoang Le, 2018
• Daniel Everson, 2018
• Lawrence Dwyer, 2018
• Bryan Paulsen, 2018
• Ryan Mak, 2018
• Nicholas Albin, 2017
• Chima Maduka, 2017
• Ricardo Perkins, 2017
• Aaron Pierre, 2017
• Srujesh Shah, 2017
• Damian Torres-Botello, 2017
• James Erler, 2016
• Daniel Gustafson, 2016
• Eric Immel, 2016
• Michael Lamanna, 2016
• Stephen Nicholson, 2016
• Juan Ruiz, 2016