Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Aaron Graham with Philosophy and Religion. Photo by Srijita Chattopadhyay/ Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services

CONTACT INFORMATION

Office: 014 Bryant Hall

Email: graham@olemiss.edu

Phone: 662-915-7020

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Ph.D. University of Chicago

Associate, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP

Law clerk to the Honorable Rhesa H. Barksdale, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

J.D. Harvard Law School

TEACHING AND COURSES OFFERED

Phil 101 Introduction to Philosophy

Phil 350 Philosophy of Law

RESEARCH

My research focuses on the nature of law and adjudication. I am particularly interested in legal reasoning and interpretation, and in the phenomenon of judicial discretion. I have related interests in metaethics, practical reasoning, and rule-following.

Publications

“The Standard Picture and Statutory Interpretation,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 36, no. 2 (2023): 341-58

2021 Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition Winners:
from Microplastics to Philosophy

by Margaret Savoie

Second Place Master’s

This year’s second place master’s 3MT Winner is Dakota Layton, a philosophy master’s student from Huntsville, AL.

Layton’s research focuses on analyzing how the spread of fake news contributes to the problem of truth-decay and how this problem infringed on an idea of Freedom. Expanding the understanding of Freedom is one of many steps needed to address the problem of truth-decay.

“We must expand our understanding of Freedom, not just for the purpose of addressing truth-decay, but for advancing the Common Good, understood as the happiness and well-being of all of our fellow citizens with whom all of us share the gift of civic friendship,” stated Layton.

Layton commented, “I am proud to have presented my work for my fellow Graduate School peers who are all doing really fantastic and timely research on solutions to problems that we are currently facing as a society and I am honored to have placed second among this group of superb finalists!”

The Graduate School is proud of all the 3MT participants in both the preliminary rounds and final rounds. Thank you to everyone who has supported these students in their endeavors.

>Click here to read full article.

Instructor of Philosophy

CONTACT INFORMATION

email: rcenglis@olemiss.edu

phone: 662-915-7020

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2019
M.A., University of Mississippi, 2011
M.A., University of Chicago, 2009
B.A., Appalachian State University, 2006

TEACHING

Phil 101 Introduction to Philosophy
Phil 103 Logic: Critical Thinking
Phil 302 Early Modern Philosophy
Phil 345 Environmental Ethics
Phil 350 Philosophy of Law
Phil 357 Business Ethics

RESEARCH

My research is organized around two centers of gravity. First, I am interested in understanding, interpreting, and coming to terms with the thought of Immanuel Kant. Second, I work in ethics and political philosophy, specifically during the modern period. My work centrally focuses on Kant’s conception of rational nature and responsible moral agency, and the role these notions play in furnishing a foundation of rights and moral status in his practical philosophy. Relatedly, I am also interested in conceptions of practical thought and moral psychology during the early modern period, especially in terms of their relation to moral and political theory.

My dissertation, “Kant on Humanity as Ground of the Innate Right to External Freedom, concerns Kant’s technical notion of “humanity”, and in particular the basic claim of his political philosophy, that humanity is the basis of the innate right to freedom. I argue in the dissertation that, contrary to two prominent suggestions in the literature, Kant understands humanity as the ground of the innate right to consist in moral personality, or the capacity for responsible moral agency. My dissertation project also involves exploration into the relation between the pure and empirical dimensions in Kant’s palimpsest theory of human nature.

I’m also interested in the nature and moral significance of grief. My first publication,  “Kant on Grief and Grieving” (forthcoming in Cambridge’s Rethinking Kant series) develops an interpretation of Kant’s view of grief in order to explain his claim in the Anthropology that “one must never grieve about anything”. This involves situating the phenomenon of grief in the theoretical vocabulary in which Kant develops his moral psychology, specifically in terms of the distinction between affects and passions. In that paper, I use as a touchstone Stoic attitudes towards grief, and urge that despite Kant’s negative remarks about grief, his is not as restrictive a view as we find in the Stoics.

I am also interested in the thought of abolitionist Frances Wright, and in addition to a recent co-authored interdisciplinary piece theorizing her entrepreneurial practice in her Neshoba commune (“Humanistic Entrepreneurship: The Pioneering Case of Frances Wright”, forthcoming in the Journal of Ethics and Entrepreneurship), I am currently at work on a project that explores Wright’s ethical theory as displayed in her Course of Public Lectures (1828), one of the earliest public lectures delivered by a woman in the United States.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy

contact information

email: basmyth@olemiss.edu

professional background

Ph.D., McGill University (2006)
D.E.A., Université Paris I (2003)
B.A., M.A., University of Waterloo (1999)

I also spent a year at the Institut für Soziologie, Karl-Franzens-Universität (Graz, Austria)

teaching

I have taught at the University of Mississippi since 2013. I previously taught at Mount Allison University and the University of Memphis, where in addition to undergraduate courses I offered several graduate seminars in my areas of specialization. Here at UM I have taught the following courses:

PHIL 101 Introduction to Philosophy
PHIL 328 Biomedical Ethics
PHIL 390 Feminist Philosophy 

research

My research deals primarily with Critical Theory and phenomenology (especially the work of Merleau-Ponty, which foregrounds questions of embodiment), and how these traditions intersect with regard to nature and history. The basic questions that guide me have to do with historical agency in relation to systemic oppression, notably (but not exclusively) sexism and racism, and other forms of social injustice. Since very early on I have been inspired as a philosopher by how German historian Lutz Niethammer once glossed the point of his own discipline: “instead of subjecting individuals to the fiction of an objectively meaningful process or fobbing them off with all manner of aestheticized fragments, it seeks to do the groundwork of their historical self-understanding and their capacity for historical action.” Among other things, this leads me to interrelated (and somewhat unorthodox) interests in myth, heroism, and epigenetics.

published volumes

The Sensible World and the World of Expression: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 – (Northwestern University Press, 2020) [translation with substantive introduction and extensive notes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: Cours au Collège de France. Notes, 1953 (Métispresses, 2011)]

Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique (Lexington Books, 2021) [collection of 10 chapters, including one of his own, plus substantive Introduction, co-edited with Richard Westerman]

Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) [monograph]

volumes in progress

Investigations into The Literary Use of Language: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1953 [translation with introduction and notes of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage: Cours au Collège de France. Notes, 1953 (Métispresses, 2013), under contract with Northwestern University Press]

Merleau-Ponty: An Ontology of the Imaginary [translation of Annabelle Dufourcq, Merleau-Ponty: une ontologie de l’imaginaire, under contract with Springer]

volumes in the pipeline

Incarnating the Good: Rethinking Heroism as an Embodied Phenomenon [monograph]

Hyperdialectical Materialism: Nature and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology [monograph]

An up-to-date list of my publications and work in progress can be found here.

Deborah Mower, Associate Professor of Philosophy

Associate Professor of Philosophy

CONTACT INFORMATION

Office:  Bryant Hall 17
Phone:  662.915.2010
email:  dsmower@olemiss.edu

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007
MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003
B.A., Pacific University, 1998

TEACHING AND COURSES OFFERED

Phil 204 Introduction to Ethical Policy Debate
Phil 347 Advanced Ethical Policy Debate
Phi 353 Consequentialism
Phil 395 Moral Psychology
Phil 102 Introduction to Professional Ethics
Phil 321 Ethics

Recent topics of upper-division and graduate-level seminars: 
Moral Transformations: Honor and Anger
The Ethical Vision(s) of Utopias
Civility

RESEARCH

Areas of Research Specialization:
Applied Ethics, Moral Psychology, Virtue Ethics, Asian Philosophy

BIOGRAPHY

Deborah S. Mower is the Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Hume Bryant Associate Professor of Ethics and an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mississippi. She specializes in moral psychology, applied ethics and public policy, and moral education and assessment with a special interest in moral sensitivity, conviction, and civility. She coordinates the Dialogue Initiative at the University of Mississippi, and is the Chair for General Education Ethical Reasoning and Ethical Responsibility. She has published numerous articles on moral education as well as two co-edited volumes with Routledge [Civility in Politics and Education (2012) and Developing Moral Sensitivity (2015)]. In 2016, she co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Moral Psychology and Education. She is the recent past President of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum (SEAC), a current Board Member for Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), a Research Member of the National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD), as well as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). She also coaches the UM Ethics Bowl team, who were the 2019 Mid-Atlantic Regional Champions.

For information about Dr. Mower’s publications can be found on her website https://www.deborahmower.com
or through the Academia page Academia.edu profile page.

SEAC: https://www.seac-online.org
PLATO: https://www.plato-philosophy.org
NICD: https://nicd.arizona.edu
APPE: https://www.appe-ethics.org
NIH: https://www.gvsu.edu/neh-institute/
Ethics Bowl: https://philosophy.olemiss.edu/ethics-bowl/
and https://libarts.olemiss.edu/um-delves-into-ethics-to-prepare-students-to-debate-societys-issues/
and https://libarts.olemiss.edu/ethics-bowl-team-wins-mid-atlantic-championship/

Dr. Mower’s research and creative activity is generously supported by the Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Hume Bryant Lectureship in Ethics Endowment

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William F. Lawhead, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy (left)

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

022 Bryant Hall
662-915-7020 | wlawhead@olemiss.edu

Professional Background
I received my B.A.in philosophy from Wheaton College, Illinois and my Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. I have been teaching since 1970 and have been with the University of Mississippi since 1980. I was Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion from 2005 to 2012.

Teaching Interests
I regularly teach undergraduate courses in logic, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion. In recent semesters I have taught a graduate seminar on the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) as well as on Wittgenstein.

For me, one of the most enjoyable tasks in teaching is getting students to see that philosophical ideas are not dusty artifacts from the museum of the mind but that they can be outrageous, fascinating, perplexing, hopeful, dangerous, gripping, troubling, exhilarating, illuminating, and (sometimes) true. Probably, the most rewarding experience in teaching is to walk out of the classroom with more ideas than I had when I started, because my students gave me new insights or left me with some hard thinking to do at the end of our discussion.

Research Interests
For the past several years, most of my work has been done in the history of philosophy. This work resulted in a book, The Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy, third edition (Wadsworth, 2007). It is a one-volume account of the history of philosophical thought from the ancient Greeks to the last few decades of the twentieth century.

This history of philosophy text is also now available as four paperbacks:
The Ancient Voyage, The Medieval Voyage, The Modern Voyage, and The Contemporary Voyage.

I have also published an introduction textbook:
The Philosophical Journey: An Interactive Approach, fourth edition (McGraw-Hill, 2009).

My third book is an anthology:
Philosophical Questions: Classical and Contemporary Readings (McGraw-Hill, 2003).

In the future I hope to publish several articles in the philosophy of religion concerning God and time.

Timothy Yenter, Associate Professor of Philosophy

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Affiliated Faculty, Cinema

CONTACT INFORMATION

Office: 020 Bryant Hall
email: tpyenter@olemiss.edu

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Ph.D., Philosophy, Yale University, 2012
B.A., History and Philosophy, Bethel University, 2001 (summa cum laude; Honors Program)

Non-degree work in history and religious studies, Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford University, 1999

I was a graduate teaching fellow at the Yale Teaching Center and a research fellow at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I have previously taught courses at Montana State University-Bozeman, Bethel University, and Yale University.

TEACHING AND COURSES OFFERED

I teach the following courses at least annually.

Philosophy 101: Introduction to Philosophy
Philosophy 302: History of Philosophy II
Philosophy 602: Studies in Modern Philosophy

I teach a rotating selection of upper-level and graduate-level courses. Recent and upcoming courses include the Scottish Enlightenment, Kant, Hume, the metaphysics of space, and the philosophy of film.

RESEARCH

My primary research project examines theories of demonstration, which are often implicit and assumed, in early modern British philosophy through Hume. This includes a cluster of articles about the standards for demonstration in Hume, how understanding his complaints about demonstrations helps us appreciate difficult or dismissed passages in Hume, and the nature of adequate ideas and their role in demonstrative reasoning from Boyle to Hume. I also write about early modern metaphysics and methodology, especially relating to the principle of sufficient reason in Clarke, Leibniz, and Spinoza.

I have a long-running interest in film and television, and some of my work falls at the intersection of cinema studies and philosophy, including forthcoming essays on Buster Keaton and on teaching the good life through cinephillia.

For more recent and more detailed information, including links to new work, please see my website.

Associate Professor of Philosophy

CONTACT INFORMATION

Office: Bryant Hall 15
Phone: 662.915.5443
email: dwishon@olemiss.edu

PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Ph.D., Stanford University, 2012
B.A., University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2005

TEACHING AND COURSES OFFERED

Phil 101 Introduction to Philosophy
Phil 103 Logic: Critical Thinking
Phil 318 Existentialism
Phil 332 Personal Identity and the Self
Phil 333 Philosophy of Language
Phil 342 Philosophy of Mind

Recent topics of upper-division and graduate-level seminars:

• Bertrand Russell
• Attention, Introspection, and Self-Knoweledge

RESEARCH

Areas of Research Specialization: Philosophy of Mind, History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Language

An up-to-date list of my publications and work in progress can be found here.

BIOGRAPHY

Donovan Wishon, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty in Neuroscience, earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University. Professor Wishon’s current research focuses on Bertrand Russell’s changing theories about the place of mind in the natural world. Among other things, his recent work sheds new light on Russell’s ideas about sensation and perception, the scope and limits of introspective knowledge, the role of conscious awareness in our thought and talk, and the relationship between the mind and the brain. Wishon is recognized as a leading expert on Russell’s later writings on “neutral monism”—the view that the universe consists entirely of transitory space-time events which are, in themselves, neither mental nor material, but which compose “minds” and “matter” when organized into complex psychological and/or physical causal systems. Wishon’s co-edited volume Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic was awarded the 2016 Bertrand Russell Society Book Prize. At the University of Mississippi, Professor Wishon regularly teaches courses on the history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, personal identity and the self, nineteenth century philosophy, philosophy of language, and logic. He has organized several academic conferences at UM on Conscious Thought and Thought about Consciousness, The Semantics and Ethics of Racial Language, Shakespeare and Philosophy, and the centenary of Bertrand Russell’s popular book The Problems of Philosophy.