Courses Taught
At the University of Alberta
PHIL 217: Biology, Society, and Values. Winter 2009, Winter 2013, Winter 2014 [syllabus]
PHIL 265: Philosophy of Science. Fall 2009, Winter 2012 [syllabus]
PHIL 317: Philosophy of Biology. Winter 2007, Winter 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Winter 2025 [syllabus]
PHIL 386: Philosophy and Health Care. Fall 2008, Fall 2010, Fall 2012 [syllabus]
PHIL 388: Philosophy and Nursing I. Fall 2011, Fall 2013
[syllabus Sect. A1,
syllabus Sect. A2]
PHIL 405/505: Philosophy of Mind – Conceptual Analysis (seminar). Winter 2010
PHIL 405/505: Philosophy of Mind – Intuitions, Conceptual Engineering, and Experimental Philosophy (seminar). Winter 2017, Fall 2020 [syllabus]
PHIL 412/510: Philosophy of Science – Overview of Primary Literature (seminar). Winter 2009, Fall 2011 [syllabus]
PHIL 412/510: Philosophy of Science – Science and Values (seminar). Fall 2015, Winter 2019, Winter 2023 [syllabus]
PHIL 412/510: Philosophy of Science – Biological and Social Kinds (seminar). Fall 2017, Fall 2021 [syllabus]
PHIL 415/510: Philosophy of Biology – Overview of Primary Literature (seminar). Winter 2008, Fall 2010, Winter 2014 [syllabus]
PHIL 415/510: Philosophy of Biology – The Neuroscience of Human Diversity (seminar). Winter 2020, Winter 2024 [syllabus]
PHIL 488/594 Current Research / Selected Problems in Philosophy – Intuitions, Conceptual Engineering, and Experimental Philosophy. Fall 2024 [syllabus]
PHIL 510: Philosophy of Science – Science and Values (seminar). Winter 2013 [syllabus]
At the University of Pittsburgh
Principles of Scientific Reasoning (introduction to inductive and deductive logic). Spring 2003
Problem Solving: How Science Works (critical and quantitative reasoning course for humanities majors). Fall 2003
Statistics and Causal Reasoning (critical and quantitative reasoning course). Spring 2004
Morality and Medicine. Fall 2004
Supervision and Training
Supervisor of Postdoctoral Fellow
Luke Kersten, Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta, September 2023 – June 2024
Joyce Havstad, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Integrative Research Center of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, April 2014 – August 2015. Co-supervision with Olivier Rieppel and Scott Lidgard (both at the Field Museum)
Graduate Thesis Supervisor
Tuğba Yoldaş, Taking Artificial Intelligences Seriously: The Grounds of Well-Being and Obligations to Artificial Moral Patients. Ph.D. in Philosophy, in progress (co-supervision)
Danielle Brown, Personality Disorders as Natural Kinds: Making Room for Non-Epistemic Values in Psychiatry, in progress
Esther Rosario, Sex as a Biological Kind: A Case of Strategic Conceptual Engineering. Ph.D. in Philosophy, January 2023
Spencer Hayden, Rethinking Ontology in Science Studies: The Return of Dialectics. M.A. in Philosophy, August 2021
Yang Zhao, The Nature of Scientific Laws. M.A in Philosophy, May 2018 (co-supervision)
Zi Huang, A Phenomenological Interpretation of Organisms. M.A in Philosophy, December 2017 (co-supervision)
Nasrin Sultana, A Defense of Bertrand Russell's Theory of Definite Descriptions against Donnellan's Distinction. M.A. in Philosophy, July 2017 (co-supervision)
Ernest Howe, Critical Thinking, Philosophical Theories of Testimony, and the Challenge of Wikipedia Knowledge Claims. Ph.D. in Theoretical, Cultural and International Studies in Education (Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta), August 2015
Taylor Murphy, Cognitive Homology: Psychological Kinds as Biological Kinds in an Evolutionary Developmental Cognitive Science. M.A. in Philosophy, September 2012
Sara Weaver, A Crossdisciplinary Exploration of Essentialism about Kinds: Philosophical Perspectives in Feminism and the Philosophy of Biology, M.A. in Philosophy, September 2011 (co-supervision)
M.A. Capstone Research Paper Supervisor
Sobhan Jalilian, title tba. M.A. in Philosophy, in progress
Lily Diamond, Medical vs Moral Kind: The Case of Antisocial Personality Disorder. M.A. in Philosophy, in progress
Farid Saberi, Reconfiguring Moral Psychology: Making Normative Perception and Causality-Based Categorization Primary. M.A. in Philosophy, April 2024 (co-supervision)
Katelynn Healy, Free Will Orthogonality and the Criminal Justice System: Making Practical Contributions about the Justification of Criminal Punishment without Agreeing on Theories of Free Will. M.A. in Philosophy, October 2022 (co-supervision)
Mahmoud Shabani, A Pluralistic Account of Autism: A Case for Strategic Conceptual Engineering. M.A. in Philosophy, September 2021
Eihab Idris, Human Interests and Scientific Reasoning: A Naturalistic Approach to Values in Science. M.A. in Philosophy, August 2020
Undergraduate Thesis Supervisor
Ryne Elliott, Against a Generalized 2-D Semantics for Dualism. B.A. (Honors) in Philosophy, May 2022
Tyler Paetkau, Righteous Rejection and Perceived Persecution: Religious Vaccine Hesitancy and the Role of Perceived Epistemic Injustice. B.A. (Honors) in Philosophy, May 2021
Addison Braa, Disabled Autonomy and the Abandonment of Assistive Technology. B.A. in Science, Technology & Society, April 2021 (capstone paper supervisor)
Taylor Murphy, Concepts and Counterfactual Reasoning. B.A. (Honors) in Philosophy, May 2010 (co-supervision)
Graduate Thesis Supervisory Committee Member
Emad Mousavian, Individualized Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Alberta, in progress
Wenzhu Li. Ph.D. in Transnational and Comparative Literatures (Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta), in progress
Kevin Kvas, On Numerology: A Reconstruction of Semiotics on the Quantitative Physics of Information Theory. Ph.D. in English, in progress
Tom Oberle, The Regress and Ground of Being: In Defence of Metaphysical Infinitism. Ph.D. in Philosophy, April 2024
Wai Fu Cheng, Scientific Progress in Conceptualizing Occupation: A Mixed-Method Study. Ph.D. in Education and Leadership, Pacific University, January 2023
Ka Ho Lam, Natural Kind Realism, Taxonomic Monism and the Hierarchy Assumption. Ph.D. in Philosophy, September 2019
Emma Peng Chien, Beyond Cognition: Philosophical Issues in Autism. Ph.D. in Philosophy, January 2017
Nicolas Bullot, Tracking and Controlling Persons: Identification for Control in Cognitive Behaviours and Cultural Practices. Ph.D. in Philosophy, September 2015
Andrew Ball, Virtue in Context. Ph.D. in Philosophy, January 2015
Jeffery Fedorkiw, Compositionality and the Metaphysics of Meaning. M.A. in Philosophy, August 2011
Michael Flood, Eternalism, Presentism, and Change. M.A. in Philosophy, June 2011
Andrei Buleandra, The Prescriptivity of Conscious Belief. Ph.D. in Philosophy, April 2011
Aristotle Hadjiantoniou, Many-Sorted Free Logic. M.A. in Philosophy, January 2009
Graduate Thesis Defence External Examiner
Riin Kõiv, The Content and Implications of Nativist Claims: A Philosophical Analysis. Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Tartu, December 2021
Simon Pollon, Agency in the Natural World. Ph.D. in Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, November 2019
Justin Bzovy, Species Pluralism: Conceptual, Ontological, and Practical Dimensions. Ph.D. in Philosophy, Western University, November 2016
Graduate Thesis Defence Arm's Length Examiner
Eric Smith, Principlism’s Colonial Ties. M.A. in Philosophy, August 2023
Taro Okamura, Hume’s Epistemic Sentimentalism. Ph.D. in Philosophy, March 2022
Peter Andes, The Ethics of Procreation and Parenthood in Affluent Nations. Ph.D. in Philosophy, January 2021
Jason Bradshaw, Decoding British Empiricism: A Distant Reading of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. M.A. in Digital Humanities with specialization in Philosophy, September 2019
Clarisse Paron, Evaluating Challenges to Patient Autonomy in BRCA Gene Testing, Breast Cancer Culture, and Preventative Mastectomy. M.A. in Philosophy, September 2019
Ceren Yıldız, How to Reconcile Identity and What Matters in Survival: Y-Shaped Space-Time Worms. M.A. in Philosophy, September 2018
Francisco Galan Tames, Intuitions about Cases and Principles: A Defense of Reflective Equilibrium. M.A. in Philosophy, May 2018
Sarah Bezan, Nature Morte: Decomposing Darwinism's Evolutionary Aesthetics. Ph.D. in English, September 2017
Meysam Shojaeenejad, Success Semantics: Motivations, Problems, and Solutions. M.A. in Philosophy, September 2017
Paul Showler, Politics of Incommensurability: The Case of Rorty and Foucault. M.A. in Philosophy, May 2016
Stephen Speake, Debating Milk: Competing Discourses on Nutrition and Safety. Ph.D. in Sociology (Department of Sociology, University of Alberta), September 2015
Katelyn Petersen, Literature of Movement: Trends, Developments, and Prospects in Transcultural Literature as Exemplified by Contemporary German-Language Texts. Ph.D. in Germanic Languages, Literatures and Linguistics (Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, joint Ph.D. program with the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich), April 2013.
Brian Dupuis, The Cognitive Science of Reorientation. M.Sc. in Psychology (Department of Psychology, University of Alberta), September 2012
Janet Grynas, A Window on the Fatherland: Christian Kracht's Faserland in English Translation. M.A. in Translation Studies (Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta), August 2012
Graduate Research Project Supervisor
Kevin Kaiser, Project: ‘Philosophical and Scientometric Analyses of Interdisciplinarity: The Case of Systems Biology.’ Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. Conducting research in Edmonton funded by a Fonds de recherche du Québec Scholarship for Internship outside Québec (BSHQ), April 1 until August 31, 2022
Sean Boivin, Project: ‘Auxiliary Assumptions and What Objectivity Can Be in Science.’ M.A. student in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University (Montréal). Conducting summer research in Edmonton funded by a Ministère de l'Éducation, de l'Enseignement (Québec) Student Mobility Bursary, April 18 until October 31, 2016
Undergraduate Research Project Supervisor
Tyler Paetkau, Project: ‘Improving Public Health Outcomes Through Group Analysis: Leveraging Ethical and Epistemic Structures to Increase Vaccination Rates Among Canada's Religious Communities..’ URI Undergraduate Researcher Stipend, Undergraduate Research Initiative, Summer 2021
Camilla Zhang, Project: ‘Can Biological Phenomena Be Explained in Virtue of Mathematics?.’ URI Undergraduate Researcher Stipend, Undergraduate Research Initiative, Summer 2014
Directed Reading Supervisor
Lily Diamond, PHIL 596 – Medical Kinds, Moral Kinds, and Personality Disorders, Fall 2024
Sobhan Jalilian, PHIL 596 – Science, Values, and Objectivity, Fall 2024
Farid Saberi, PHIL 596 – Moral Psychology: Normative Perception & Causal Cognition, Fall 2023
Joshua Barden, PHIL 596 – Contemporary Issues in Embodied Cognition, Winter 2022
Mahmoud Shabani, PHIL 596 – Science, Values, and Human Diversity, Spring 2021
Tyler Paetkau, PHIL 486 – Science, Society, and Feminism, Fall 2020
Spencer Hayden, PHIL 596 – Science, Society, and Feminism, Fall 2020
Eihab Idris, PHIL 596 – Value Judgements in Science, Winter 2020
Tuğba Yoldaş, PHIL 597 – Conceptual Analysis, Intuitions, and Experimental Philosophy, Fall 2018
Elizabeth Carlson, PHIL 486 – Science and Values, Winter 2013
Emma Kennedy, PHIL 596 – Overview of Primary Literature in Philosophy of Biology, Summer 2012
René Malenfant, BIOL 490 – Overview of Primary Literature in Philosophy of Biology, Fall 2009
Taylor Murphy, PHIL 486 – Integrating Different Theoretical Approaches in Biology, Summer 2009
Catherine Clune-Taylor, PHIL 596 – Overview of Primary Literature in Philosophy of Biology, Summer 2009
Cheryl Mack, PHIL 596 – Overview of Primary Literature in Philosophy of Biology, Winter 2009