All posts tagged: editor: smrutipriya pattnaik

APA Member Interview, Elena Comay del Junco

APA Member Interview, Elena Comay del Junco

Published by Jenni Sidey

Elena Comay del Junco is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the history of philosophy, primarily Ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy. Recent and forthcoming work includes essays on Aristotle’s and Ibn Sina’s accounts of love as well as a translation of Ibn Sina’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ. She also teaches and writes on questions of gender and feminism. In addition to her scholarly endeavors, she also writes criticism, poetry, and fiction; recent publications include an essay on the novelist Pierre Guyotat and a translation of an 18th-century comic opera about Aristotle’s sex life. What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it? I have bad habit of reading too many things at once, but among those is Rumi’s Masnavi, which I’ve been slowly working through in a bilingual edition to teach myself Persian. I’m about 1,200 of 24,000 couplets of the way in and would, at least on that basis, recommend it. The skepticism about the popularization of Rumi is in some sense justified—in addition to …

APA Member Interview: Felipe De Brigard

APA Member Interview: Felipe De Brigard

Published by Jenni Sidey

The APA Blog is publishing excerpts from Cliff Sosis’s long-form interviews with philosophers, which appear at his blog, What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? The excerpts below are from an interview originally published on March 20, 2026, and reprinted with permission from Cliff Sosis. In this interview, Felipe De Brigard; Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience; Faculty member of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience; and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society talks about growing up among and learning to live with bombs, kidnappings, and conflicts in Colombia during the time of Pablo Escobar, Catholicism, Dungeons and Dragons, aspirations to become a priest, hormones, Nietzsche, theater, Descartes, attending the National University of Colombia, memory and Aristotle; applying to and being rejected from 10 grad schools; how Adrian Cussins helped him get into Tufts, Fodor, beer pong, Dennett, and working at the Danish Pastry House; contemplating going to grad school for neuroscience and getting into UNC philosophy; the differences between public and private universities; working with Prinz, Knobe, Lycan, Dorit Bar-On, and eventually Kelly Giovanello …

APA Member Interview: Shaun Gallagher

APA Member Interview: Shaun Gallagher

Published by Jenni Sidey

The APA Blog is publishing excerpts from Cliff Sosis’s long-form interviews with philosophers, which appear at his blog, What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? The excerpts below are from an interview originally published on October 27, 2025 and reprinted with permission from Cliff Sosis. In this interview, Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, talks about growing up in Philly, Catholic school, summer on the Jersey shore, considering becoming a cowboy (or philosopher), JFK, Janis Joplin, studying theology as an undergrad at St. Columban’s, Vietnam and institutional religion, bad faith and existentialism, a stint as a private detective, pursuing his PhD at Bryn Mawr, summers in Ireland (where his parents were from), working with José Ferrater-Mora, Merleau-Ponty, becoming more aware of the relevance of science, his first publication, getting eight interviews at the APA smoker and one job offer, phenomenology, cognitive science, and the value of interdisciplinary approaches, embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition, what drives him, Parmenides, and the meaning of life… What was your earliest …

Ethics in Business, James Murphy

Ethics in Business, James Murphy

Published by Jenni Sidey

Several years ago, I took over teaching an interdisciplinary elective in the Management Department at Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business entitled “Ethics, Economics, and Entrepreneurship.” Loyola’s Jesuit Mission, especially the Ignatian Pedagogy Paradigm’s emphasis on cura personalis, care for the whole person, places a high emphasis on critical thinking. So I decided to try and build a syllabus that would allow the students to criticize the content of the class I usually teach, “Ethics in Business,” a core class in Quinlan’s curriculum that every student is required to take. This syllabus thus addresses the “dark side” of capitalist social dynamics through the lens of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction, focusing on those initial, often institutionally unstructured moments after a successful innovation disrupts a given market or industry. We begin the class by reading Smith’s famous passage on “the little boy who wanted to play” from The Wealth of Nations, opening the class with the idea that one of the main drivers of “innovation” is the desire to be free from work. From there, we …

APA Member Interviews, Sharon Crasnow

APA Member Interviews, Sharon Crasnow

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sharon Crasnow works on epistemological issues in the methodology of the social sciences. Her focus is primarily on feminist epistemology and philosophy of science and conceptual and measurement issues in the social sciences. What excites you about philosophy? One of the most exciting things about philosophy is that it is a field in which you can explore almost anything. Even though much philosophy is exceedingly narrow, it doesn’t have to be! What is your favorite thing that you’ve written? I’d say that I have two favorite pieces. One is among my first publications, and the other is my most recent. The early one is “How Natural Can Ontology Be?” in Philosophy of Science, March 2000, and the recent one is “Objectivity and Measurement in Political Science,” in Philosophy of Science, 2026. These are papers for which the basic idea just came to me clearly, and although it took time to work out the details, I knew from the start what it was that I wanted to say. I still think that the main idea in …

APA Member Interview, Chloe W. Chang

APA Member Interview, Chloe W. Chang

Published by Jenni Sidey

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Gratitude, Belonging, and Philosophy | Blog of the APA

Gratitude, Belonging, and Philosophy | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

I came to philosophy somewhat by accident. I am from a bureaucratic, military-dominated area of Northern Virginia; almost everyone I went to high school with went into IT, the military, defense R&D, or sales. When I was invited to an after-school seminar club, “The Dead Philosophers’ Society,” by a history-buff friend of mine, I initially resisted (writing this, I now realize I still have never seen Dead Poets’ Society). I had no idea what an after-school seminar discussing ‘philosophy’ entailed; I did not even know what the involved questions would be. I am glad I went, in part because I quickly realized there was something very interesting here, even if the other high schoolers did not know much, either. The initial session was not very organized, but the idea of the group was student-led discussions on various topics. The first day was deciding the future topics, of which “ethics” was chosen. So, I became interested in what “ethics” even was. Exploring online, I found what would be my philosophical starting point: John Stuart Mill. The …

APA Member Interview, Christian Culak

APA Member Interview, Christian Culak

Published by Jenni Sidey

Christian Culak is a moral philosopher concurrently lecturing at Texas A&M University-San Antonio and the University of Texas at San Antonio. When he’s not corrupting the youth in academia, he’s corrupting musical genres with his personal music project. What are you working on right now? Currently I’m working on a virtue ethics approach to the issue of whether examples of moral badness should be allowed in machine learning with artificial moral agents. Motivating the side that we should do so is of special interest to me, with a focus on actions that are not wrong yet worse than morally indifferent. What do you like to do outside work? Music! Since 2013, I’ve had a DIY solo musical project called Culak. It’s mostly metal but aimed at conveying multifaceted experiences, which leads me to incorporate instruments that are unconventional to traditional metal like violin, synthesizer, piano, choir, and organ. One or two albums are released each year. There are 20 so far with the next fully written in pre-production. Strength training is also a hobby of …

“King of the who?”: Monty Python on Rousseauian Legitimacy

“King of the who?”: Monty Python on Rousseauian Legitimacy

Published by Jenni Sidey

In this short clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Arthur, King of the Britons, attempts to exercise his dominion over two of his supposed subjects—peasants who claim to live in an anarcho-syndicalist commune and to have no lord. One of them raises two objections to the legitimacy of Arthur’s power that are illustrative when discussing Rousseau’s social contract theory. Selections from Rousseau’s Social Contract are a staple in my introductory “Citizens and their Cities” class. We read most of Bk. I, and short sections of Bks. II and IV, in order to trace where Rousseau’s initial commitments lead him. Near the beginning of our engagement with Rousseau, I ask the students to pick a partner and talk for two minutes about (1) why they follow the law (if they do), and (2) why one should follow the law (if they should). The students come up with some interesting reasons, but most reasons are variations on “If I don’t, I’ll be punished.” (That the Rousseauian answer—the law is mine—is rarely given certainly says something about our political chains condition.) This …

Understanding Evil, Jaime Denison | Blog of the APA

Understanding Evil, Jaime Denison | Blog of the APA

Published by Jenni Sidey

In summer 2025, I was approached by the director of the Central New Mexico (CNM) Honors Program to teach the seminar Understanding Evil in the 2025 fall semester, a seminar originally offered in the former Honors Program by a fellow colleague. I had taught my seminar, The Legacy of the Polis, in the Honors Program, focusing on political philosophy, urban design, and civic engagement at the local level. Given my experience in teaching honors seminars, I was already thinking about a course focusing on representations of evil and what they may say about the issues and anxieties of society, such as what we see in classic horror and contemporary true-crime genres. Thus, I was very excited for the opportunity to teach this course even if it was focused on “understanding” evil, since I already had a few ideas of what to bring in for readings given my background in German philosophy and critical theory.  In designing the course, I had two guiding questions I wanted to continuously pose to the students as we moved through …