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     [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 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

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

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, in progress

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

Farid Saberi, PHIL 596 – TBA, 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