Think Western

Philosophy Department Annual Newsletter

Alumni Spotlight

Michael Grigoni ('00)

(Photo by Chris Charles, courtesy of Duke Arts)

How did you get into philosophy?

Many of the questions that drew me to the study of philosophy as an undergraduate had to do with religion, but it was Hud Hudson’s introduction to metaphysics course, “Knowledge and Reality,” that led me to pick philosophy as my major. Those who’ve had Hud as a teacher know that his lectures are exhilarating. After taking his class, I wanted nothing more than to continue exploring philosophy. I remember being similarly enthralled by Phillip Montague’s course on aesthetics, Thomas Downing’s course on the philosophy of language, and courses on ethics with Frances Howard-Snyder, among others. I suppose, then, that my entrée into the discipline had much to do with these teachers.

What have you been up to recently? 

Two things, mostly. I recently defended a PhD in religion at Duke University where I wrote a dissertation on the relationship of guns to American evangelical Christianity. To ground my reflections, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with evangelical Christian handgun owners in central North Carolina. After defending my dissertation, I spent two years at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke. I now serve as Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem where, in addition to teaching, I’m working on revising my dissertation for publication as a book.

Over the years I’ve also kept up a musical practice as a steel guitarist, releasing instrumental music with ambient/experimental label 12k. I’ve also been collaborating with dancers and choreographers in the context of Michael Kliën’s Lab for Social Choreography at Duke, which has led to some really dynamic performance experiences.


How do you think your background in philosophy helped prepare you for the kind of work you are doing now?

Philosophy is a discipline that champions precision and clarity of thought in speech and in writing. Seeing these values modeled in the classes I took as an undergraduate and being expected to model these values in course papers made for powerful pedagogy. It was the ideal starting point for the work I’m currently engaged in as a teacher and researcher. Even had I not pursued a career in academia, the repeated exposure to this way of thinking, and the expectation to reproduce it in course assignments, was deeply formative for me and would have benefitted me in other career paths.


What advice would you give other students considering philosophy as a field of study? 

Go for it. Don’t be overconcerned with whether or not a degree in philosophy is a practical choice. That’s the wrong question, I think—and you have your twenties (and beyond) to figure that stuff out. Philosophy offers you the chance to think deeply and carefully about big questions. It simultaneously cultivates precision and wonder. Other disciplines do too, of course, but perhaps not to the degree that philosophy does. If you’re drawn to it, it’s worth pursuing. It’s an investment—to use an economic metaphor—that pays dividends over a lifetime.

Faculty & Staff News

DAN HOWARD-SNYDER

Winter 2023 began with five philosophy majors in my seminar on faith and faithfulness. Before nearly every class, they studied many of the chapter-drafts for the book I’m writing on the subject, as well as a variety of other primary sources. Conversation with them over that material helped me enormously. I’m grateful to them.

 

Publications that came out this year, all with Dan McKaughan (Boston College): "Faith and faithfulness," in Faith and Philosophy; "Theorizing about Christian faith in God with John Bishop," in Religious Studies; "The problem of faith and reason," in The Cambridge Handbook of Religious Epistemology; and a co-edited special issue of Religious Studies, a critical introduction to which is here: "Normative appraisals of faith in God".

 

On the family side, Frances and I enjoyed getting away to Eastern Washington in June and downtown Vancouver BC in September. Peter continues to shine while working with autistic children through Wings Services. William is finishing up his MS in CS at the UW, continuing to research Covid-19 in Erick Matsen’s lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The super-duper highlight of the year was William’s wedding. He and Hannah Feller tied the knot, much to the joy of family and friends—but especially his parents!

FRANCES HOWARD-SNYDER

I published a short story, “The Leak,” in Marrow Magazine.

I published a short story, “Better Vision” in Memento Mori (a CultureCult magazine).

My (as yet unpublished) young adult novel, A Willow Cabin at your Gate earned first place in its category at the Chanticleer International Book Awards.

I wrote a book, Cause and Effect in Fiction, which has been accepted by Macmillan Palgrave and will be published in 2024.

In June, I travelled to Eastern Washington with Dan and Peter and his partner (Josie), and William and his partner (Hannah). In September, I travelled to Vancouver with Dan for a fun anniversary getaway of kayaking, hiking, golf, food, and a comedy show. In January and October, I travelled to England to spend time with my parents – writing, reading, walking, chitchatting, and doing English stuff like Shakespeare, afternoon tea, and marmite.

I travelled to Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile in December for an incredible writing retreat with Wayfaring Writers.

The biggest highlight of the year was the wedding of my son, William, to the wonderful Hannah Feller (WWU 2023 grad). Watching William and Peter grow and flourish continues to be my greatest joy.

HUD HUDSON

In 2023 . . . I taught one course on the Rationalists, another on the Empiricists, and introduced 160 or so students to the Philosophy of Religion. I learned about classical Chinese philosophy by auditing Neal Tognazzini’s excellent course on the topic during the Spring. I studied a good deal of twentieth-century British, Irish, and American poetry.  I chipped away at a number of projects in analytic theology. I finished my first year on the Hydrow rowing machine, reaching 1,000 miles at the one-year mark. I felt thankful for all the good things in my life.

 

In July, I had the pleasure of officiating at the wedding of Hannah Feller and William Howard-Snyder, and I turned in my flannel shirt and cargo shorts for the first suit I’ve worn in years.

 

Bear the Shih Tzu notes that he will turn ten on St Patrick’s Day but insists he’s in his prime. I’ve enjoyed almost a full decade of wonderful friendship with him. Bear asked to contribute a quote of his own this year that expresses his frame of mind as he enters his senior years (see his picture).

 

Xerxes and I faithfully continue our habit of reading one book every week and posting her reactions online; this coming April we complete our seventeenth year. You are all encouraged to click the Xerxes link on my webpages each Sunday to follow our progress. Xerxes would like to leave you with a quote connected to why we devote so much of our time to reading (see her picture).

“Do I contradict myself?  Very well then I contradict myself.  I am large, I contain multitudes.”  

– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Here are “the tears of things.” – Virgil, Aeneid

SÙSANNA À'KINLOCHALINE

Greetings from Sùsanna and Olive. After a nice, full year on campus, Olive and I welcomed the summer of 2023 with lots of walks, hikes, and time spent with friends. In July, I visited the Okanagan, a region in British Columbia that has been on my travel go, see, & do list. This trip was part of a birthday surprise that included staying at a lovely Italian-style villa and working winery with gorgeous views of orchards and vineyards. The hot, dry weather and mountainous landscape was a welcoming place – it took me back to my American Southwest childhood. While the entire trip was fantastic, the final pièce de resistance was seeing singer-songwriter, William Prince, perform live at the amphitheater in Oliver, BC.

In August, Olive and I joined friends at the Lake District in BC, where we enjoyed all things summer. While she didn’t catch any fish, she did try but settled for loon-watching on the dock in the early mornings, while I read Frances May’s Under the Tuscan Sun.


“Deep Summer is when laziness finds respectability.”

~Sam Keen

CHRISTIAN LEE

Winter quarter of 2023 I took a course in classical guitar, throughout the year there was more San Juan sailing with friends and family, and I completed my first marathon all alone on steep empty logging roads near my home. Dog-parenting (Ramona) has been a source of joy and challenge. Our shared time together continues to sustain the benefits of solitude without accompanying loneliness. So happy to have her in my life. My year ended with a trip to see family over the holidays followed by a trip to Tucson where I visited an old friend and hiked in the desert sunshine.  

On the teaching side of things: 2023 found me developing an environmental ethics course and a logic course; advising an honors thesis; taking part in another FIG (first-year interest group) entitled Climate Change Cognition; and teaching on wellbeing, pessimism, and misanthropy over the summer quarter.   

NEAL TOGNAZZINI

Maybe it's just a coincidence, or maybe it's the stark contrast to the dark days of pandemic teaching, but 2023 was one of the most rewarding years for me in the classroom. I revamped my Critical Thinking course, which rejuvenated my own interest in it, and I pushed myself to teach new topics in my upper-division courses. In the winter my metaphysics students read a book on the Buddhist no-self view with me; in spring I taught a brand new class on Classical Chinese Philosophy, which will probably become a permanent course in the department; and in the fall I treasured each week with my small seminar as we discussed the moral psychology of shame and grief. One of the best things about being a professor is having built-in opportunities for continuing education, and this year it felt like I learned as much as I taught.

In terms of research: I traveled to Detroit and San Francisco for conferences, and I finished up editorial work on a collection of essays (published by Routledge) written in honor of my dissertation advisor at UC Riverside, John Martin Fischer. I owe my graduate school mentors a huge debt of gratitude, so that was a very meaningful project to complete -- and it was especially fun because my co-editors were my good friends Taylor Cyr and Andrew Law (who is himself a WWU grad).

The two highlights of my year, personally, were celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary by taking a 7-night cruise to Alaska (that's us on the balcony of our stateroom), and helping to cause the Taylor Swift earthquake in Seattle with my tween. (That's her with the electric guitar in the photo. My tween, that is, not TS.) I also traveled to Los Angeles twice -- once with my mom to see John Williams conduct his movie music at the Hollywood Bowl and later in the year to attend the baptism of my now-goddaughter. It was a good year.

RYAN WASSERMAN

This was a year of many “firsts” for our family. Most notably, our son Benjamin graduated from high school, moved out of the house, and started college. Even more importantly (according to Zoë), we went to our first Taylor Swift concert. At work, I taught a new course on the philosophy of language, launched a host of curricular changes, and completed my twelfth (!) year as chair. On the scholarly side, my papers “Freedom and Time Travel” and “Time Travel, Freedom, and Incompatibilism” were published in Wiley’s A Companion to Free Will and Erkenntnis, respectively, while my paper “Todd on the Open Future” was accepted at Analytic Philosophy. I also wrote a new paper on the open future, revised an old paper on counterfactuals, and gave two talks at Boise State University.   

DENNIS WHITCOMB

This year I started to see a long term-project on erotetic logic come to fruition with my first publication on that topic.  Erotetic logic is sort of like the standard (so-called “classical”) logic we teach at Western, but the arguments it studies have questions (in addition to assertions) among their premises and conclusions. For example, in erotetic logic the following counts as an argument:  “Someone wrote the Republic.  So, who was it?”.  The paper I published this year proves some new theorems about his kind of logic, and it attempts to apply those theorems to some philosophical questions about the nature of rationality.  It has been super fun to research these topics and contribute to the scholarly discussions about them.  Further papers are in the works. 

This summer I taught Philosophy of Art for the first time in 13 years.  It was interesting to re-learn that material.  If you ever want to re-learn something (or to learn something for the first time), there is no better way to do that than by teaching it to other people.  And the students in that course – wow, they were great!  They reminded me of the many generations of great students I’ve had the pleasure of working with here at Western.

I spent a lot of time hanging out at our creek on the farm, having fires and roasting s'mores.  And I played about five gigs as a member of a blues band.  Regular readers of this newsletter may recall that for many years – more than I care to remember - I have been trying to become good enough at music to play bar gigs.  Well, it happened!  We rocked the Main Street Bar and Grill in Ferndale a number of times, and the audience seemed to really dig it. 

Class of 2023

John Adams

Reece Brown

Benjamin Brownfield

Andrew Curtis

Kaden Dagher

Tyler Dardano

Jordan Dean

Austin Francis

Masina Ieremia

Noah Lewis

Jacob Luten

Alec Martin

Andrew Oslin

Colby Passadore

Evan Saunders

Eli Spitulnik

Grant Thomas

Jose Vega

Allan Zhou

Congratulations to all our graduates and Scholarship recipients!

Departmental Tuition Waiver Scholarship


Grace Denton

Ben Jakupcak

Christina Notturno