Recent MA & PhD Defenses
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
- Lawrence Dwyer, 2018
- Daniel Everson, 2018
- Ryan Mak, 2018
- Bryan Paulsen, 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
