About

Hi there!

I'm Cassie Finley. I am currently a Civil Discourse Postdoctoral Fellow at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University for the 2025/2026 academic year. My research centers on virtue theory, with particular interest in the role of virtues in dialogue, philosophy of education, social epistemology, and the ethics of technology. 

I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Iowa, supervised by Prof. Ali Hasan. My dissertation, "On the Unity of Moral and Intellectual Virtue," developed a contemporary defense of the 'Strong' unity of moral and intellectual virtues, arguing that there is only one virtue, and that individual and categorical distinctions between virtues present a number of theoretical challenges that can be resolved with a Strong Unity view. While I grant that using language that picks out particular individual virtues is quite useful, virtue-language should be understood as "rules of thumb" in making us more responsive to reasons across different contexts rather than as theoretically robust individual virtues. 

The final chapter of my dissertation applies my integrated picture of "moral and intellectual virtues" to education and pedagogy. More specifically, I introduce a Virtue Dialogue Theory which offers a framework for cultivating both "moral virtues" (e.g., kindness, courage, honesty, justice, etc.) and "intellectual virtues" (e.g., interpretative charity, intellectual humility, critical thinking, open-mindedness, etc.) through the practice of engaging in good dialogue. 

While my dissertation largely focuses on the theoretical and pedagogical dimensions of my proposed Virtue dialogue Theory, my experiences framing middle school, high school, and undergraduate philosophy classes in terms of practicing having good dialogues has been very encouraging for the practical implementations of my research. 

I spent the 2024/2025 academic year as the Civil Disagreement and Dialogue Teaching Fellow at Wesleyan University in the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life. There, I taught weekly seminar courses focused on implementing my Virtue Dialogue framework, combining practices to cultivate virtues with in- and out-of-class dialogues and philosophical tools to help navigate communication at the conceptual level. 

I've been involved with the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership (ICDP) since fall 2024, along with folks at Harvard, Stanford, California State University Bakersfield, DePauw University, St. Phillips College, and Santa Fe College. The ICDP brings together undergraduate students from across the country, from diverse institutions, and a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. In summer 2025, we received an institutional impact grant of $500,000 from Wake Forest University's Educating Character Initiative to expand the ICDP. 

I'm very excited to be joining University of Cincinnati's Philosophy Department and Ethics Center fall 2026 as Assistant Professor-Educator.

Summer 2023 I moved to Detroit, MI with my partner, Kris, and two dogs, Poppy and Octavia, after Kris accepted a tenure-track position in the Philosophy Department at Eastern Michigan University. 

I've also been teaching philosophy at AstraNova, an online experimental middle school founded at SpaceX, since Fall 2022.