Randall Curren
is a Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Education (secondary) at the University of Rochester (New York), and was Chair of Moral and Virtue Education in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues at the University of Birmingham (England), and Professor in the Royal Institute of Philosophy (London) 2013-15. He was the Ginny and Robert Loughlin Founders’ Circle Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey for 2012-13. Most notably, he is the author of Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). He is the editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Blackwell, 2003) and the journal Theory and Research in Education (Sage, UK). He is also the co-editor of the University of Chicago Press History and Philosophy of Education Series. He directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on "Overcoming Conflict: Aristotle on Justice, Friendship, and Virtue,” was a three time grant recipient from the Spencer Foundation, and received an Andrew Mellon Foundation Grant (provided by the Humanities Corridor of Central New York) for work on UNESCO’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Most recently, he serves as a co-PI (with Richard Ryan and Laura Wray-Lake) for a University of Rochester Research Award on “Virtues as Moral-Psychological Constructs.” His current work in moral psychology and philosophy of education is focused on motivation, meaning in life, devotion to non-instrumental goods, global citizenship, and judgment.
Justin D'Arms
is a Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He was a major participant on a three year long grant from the John Templeton Foundation Grant for The Science of Ethics, and received a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Grant Award for $75,0000 with Daniel Jacobson. His is the author or co-author of over 20 articles and the co-editor (with Daniel Jacobson) of Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics. He serves as a regular reviewer for the Chicago-Kent Law Review, Ethics, The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophy of Science, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. His research interests are focused on how facts about human nature and hypotheses about human evolution are relevant to normative questions about justice, morality, reasons and values. His most current work is Rational Sentimentalism (with Daniel Jacobson), which is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Catherine Elgin
is a Professor of Philosophy of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She earned her B.A. at Vasssar College and her Ph.D. At Brandeis University. She is the author of Considered Judgment, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, With Reference to Reference, and co-author (with Nelson Goodman) of Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. She is editor of The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman, and co-editor (with Jonathan E. Adler) of Philosophical Inquiry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Dewey Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the John Templeton Foundation and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College.
Owen Flanagan
is the James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He is also a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience and a steering committee member of the “Philosophy, Arts, and Literature” (PAL) program, and an Affiliate of the Graduate Program in Literature. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston University. He is widely credited as the philosopher responsible for beginning the field known today as moral psychology. He served as the department chair at Duke, as well as the President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He has had visiting positions at Berkeley, Brandeis, Princeton, Harvard, and La Trobe in Australia, University of Vienna, City University of Hong Kong, as well as several fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center. He has served as a reviewer for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Templeton Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. He is a highly sought after speaker and has lectured all over the world. He has authored or co-edited twelve books. Two foundational texts within moral psychology are Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology, edited with Amelie O. Rorty (MIT Press, 1990) and Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (Harvard University Press, 1991). In 1998, he was the recipient of the Romanell National Phi Beta Kappa award, given annually to one American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and the public understanding of philosophy. He is currently finishing The Geography of Morals, a book on cross-cultural moral psychology and ethics (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Steven Fesmire
is a Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Green Mountain College in Vermont, a visiting instructor at Middlebury College, and a 2015-16 Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College. Much of his research has focused on Classical American philosophy, especially the pragmatism of John Dewey. Author of numerous articles and book chapters, he is most recently the author of Dewey (Routledge, 2015) and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Dewey (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2017). His book John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2003) was the winner of a 2005 Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" award, and focused on developing an adequate philosophical psychology of wise deliberation. His current work sweeps in the wider sphere of human interactions with complex natural and social systems, which he developed in a cross-cultural context as a Fulbright Scholar at Kyoto University and Kobe University in 2008-2009. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Ecological Imagination: Essays in Practical Ethics and Education, which will incorporate research on Scottish Enlightenment philosophers to be honed in 2016 as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
William Flesch
is a Professor of English at Brandeis University. In 2014-2015, he was an Old Dominion Fellow of the Humanities Council and Visiting Professor of English at Princeton University, and in 2012 he served as an International Chair Professor at the National Technical University at Taipei. He is the author of over twenty articles and three books, most notably Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment and Other Biological Components of Fiction. His most fundamental interests are in literary cognition, specifically in the dynamics of literary experience, from poetic meter to narrative to film. He teaches, podcasts, and publishes broadly and reviews frequently for the Los Angeles Review of Books and for the Times Literary Supplement. He is currently completing a book on narrative will in fiction and film.
Michael B. Gill
is a Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina in 1995 and taught at Purdue University and the College of Charleston before moving to the University of Arizona in 2003. He is on Executive Committee of the International Hume Society and is a long-time member of the University of Arizona’s Medical Ethics Committee. He is the author of The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge University Press 2006) and Humean Moral Pluralism (Oxford University Press 2014), and has published over thirty journal articles. He works on the history of moral philosophy, medical ethics, and contemporary ethical theory and has a number of forthcoming articles in medical ethics.
Dan Johnson
is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a Core Neuroscience Faculty member at Washington and Lee University. He has received multiple grants and fellowships in support of his work from the University of Oklahoma and Washington and Lee University. His research interests include the effects of narrative fiction on emotional perception, empathy, theory of mind, and prejudice. His recent collaborative work with his colleagues in the humanities focus on the how readers’ perception of literary quality influence their empathy for the characters and text comprehension. His published work on narrative’s ability to foster empathic growth and prejudice reduction has received popular press attention with coverage in the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and The Atlantic.
Mark Johnson
is a Professor of Philosophy and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. His research has focused on the philosophical implications of the role of human embodiment in meaning, conceptualization, reasoning, and values. He has authored, co-authored, or edited seven books: (1) Metaphors We Live By (1980) and (2) Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) with George Lakoff, (3) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1987), (4) Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (1993), (5) The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (2007), and most recently (6) Morality for Humans: Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science (2014). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics in philosophy of art and aesthetics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, philosophical psychology, and moral theory. He is currently working on the aesthetic dimensions of human meaning making and their role in the emergence of moral values from our bodily and interpersonal experience.
Carlton Mackey
is the Assistant Director of the D. Abbott Turner Program in Ethics and Servant Leadership and the Director of the Ethics and the Arts Program for the Emory University Center for Ethics. He serves on the Board of Directors for the WonderRoot Center for Art and Social Change and Grammy U and on the advisory boards of the Youth Theological Initiative and Forever-Family. Mackey is a professional artist. He was awarded a grant from the Emory Center for Creativity and the Arts to create a photography exhibit to accompany his documentary film 17 Degrees Ain’t Nothing, an intimate profile of five individuals living on the streets of Atlanta, Georgia. For this work, Mackey was awarded the first Creativity and the Arts Award by Emory. In 2013, Mackey was awarded Emory University's Award of Distinction. In 2012, Mackey created Beautiful in Every Shade and its first signature project 50 Shades of Black.
Margaret Moore
is a Philosophy Lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She received her Ph.D. from Temple University in 2010 and had a two-year post-doc at Leeds in the United Kingdom. Her work is primarily in aesthetics, including its intersections with the philosophy of mind and theories of imagination as well as the philosophy of music. Recent presentations include a lecture on “Music, Imagination and Philosophical Aesthetics” for the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development at the University of Edinburgh. Her two most recent publications are “Musical Beauty and Neuroaesthetics” in a 2014 issue of Philosophy and “Moving in Concert: Dance and Music" (with Noël Carroll) in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, edited by the late Peter Goldie and E. Schellekens (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Deborah Mower
is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Youngstown State University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. She is the President of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum and an active presenter and member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. She co-edited Civility in Politics and Education (Routledge 2012, with Wade L. Robison) and Developing Moral Sensitivity (Routledge, 2015, with Phyllis Vandenberg and Wade L. Robison). She has been a participant of a NEH Summer Seminar and served as a reviewer for National Endowment for the Humanities programs. Her research interests include social cognition; moral education, development, and assessment; the evolution of moral faculties; and eastern and western approaches to virtue ethics. Her most recent publication is “Situationism and Confucian Virtue Ethics” in a 2013 issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.
Shaun Nichols
is a Professor at the University of Arizona. His research is at the intersection of philosophy and psychology. He is the author of (1) Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment, (2) Bound: Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility, and co-author (with Stephen Stich) of (3) Mindreading. He co-directed (with Ron Mallon) the NEH funded Summer Institute on Experimental Philosophy. He has co-edited 6 volumes, most notably Experimental Philosophy, Vols 1 & 2 (with Joshua Knobe) and Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy (with Knobe and Tania Lombrozo). He has also published over seventy-five articles in academic journals and serves on several editorial boards in academic publishing, including the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He is the Principle Investigator for a three-year grant through the Office of Naval Research on “Bayesian Learning and Moral Cognition,” and directs a research group on experimental philosophy at the University of Arizona, which attempts to uncover the psychological factors that influence how we think about
philosophical matters.
Michael S. Pritchard
is the Willard A. Brown Professor of Philosophy and Co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethics in Society at Western Michigan University, where he has taught since 1968. He has served as a board member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics as well as on the Executive Committee for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum. He has been very active in the American Philosophical Association, serving and chairing multiple committees. He has also served as Chair of the Ethics Commission for the National Communication Association and is the former co-editor (with Elaine E. Englehardt) of Teaching Ethics. He has received multiple grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and served as the Principle Investigator (PI) or the Co-PI on six grants from the National Science Foundation. He is the author or co-author of more than ten books, has given over three hundred presentations, and has published over one hundred articles on various aspects of theoretical and practical ethics, the philosophical thinking of children, and the moral philosophy of 18th Century British moralists. His most recent book is Obstacles to Ethical Decision-Making (Cambridge 2013, edited with Patricia Werhane, Laura Hartman, Crina Archer, and Elaine Englehardt). He is currently engaged in research and writing on the moral philosophies of 18th Century Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and David Hume.
Richard Shusterman
is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. His major authored books in English include (1) Thinking through the Body, (2) Body Consciousness, (3) Surface and Depth, (4) Performing Live, (5) Practicing Philosophy, (6) T.S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism, and (7) Pragmatist Aesthetics (now published in fifteen languages). He received his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford and has held academic appointments in France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Israel, and Japan. The French government honored him as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and he was awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, American Council of Learned Societies, the Humboldt Foundation, and UNESCO. His research in somaesthetics is nourished by his training and professional practice in the Feldenkrais Method.
Nancy E. Snow
is Professor and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma. Her work is in virtue ethics and moral psychology. She is the Associate Editor for Ethics and Philosophy for the Journal of Moral Education. She is (1) the author of Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (Routledge 2010), (2) the editor of Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (Oxford 2015), and (3) the co-editor (with Franco V. Trivigno) of The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness (Routledge 2014). She is currently under contract with Oxford University Press to edit the Oxford Handbook of Virtue (forthcoming) and to coedit, with Julia Annas and Darcia Narvaez, Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives. She has published numerous articles on aspects of virtue ethics, and is currently the project co-director, with Darcia Narvaez, of “The Self, Motivation, and Virtue Project,” a three-year, $2.6 million initiative funded by the Templeton Religion Trust.
Phyllis Vandenberg
is a Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Utah. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Ethics across the Curriculum and an active member of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. She co-edited Developing Moral Sensitivity (Routledge, 2015 with Deborah S. Mower and Wade L. Robison) and co-directed (with Deborah S. Mower) the 14th International Conference of the Society for Ethics across the Curriculum at Grand Valley State University in 2012. She is a contributor and reviewer for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her presentations and publications are primarily on the ethical theories of the 18th century Scots: Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. Her latest pieces are “Relationships and the Spectator Perspectives in Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith” in Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, “Reid and Hume in Agreement on Moral Foundations” in Journal of Scottish Thought (University of Aberdeen Press 2011), and “A Humean Look at Feminist’s Ethics” Special European Legacy Edition on Hume (Routledge, June 2013).