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Philosophy Department Annual Newsletter
Philosophy Department Annual Newsletter
# of philosophy majors: 41
# of philosophy/politics/economics majors: 13
# of philosophy minors: 22
# of 2024 graduates: 14
# of students who enrolled in a philosophy GUR last year: 1,368
Our students are double-majoring in: Accounting, Communication Studies, French, Journalism, Linguistics, Physics, Psychology, and Sociology.
Alumni Spotlight
Alumni Spotlight
Lindsay Mahony ('06) and family
How did you get into philosophy?
My original plan was to go to law school and was told that philosophy was great “training” for that. I completely agree with this sentiment, but for a variety of reasons, I chose not to go down the law school path. Regardless, I was hooked. After trying math, political science, Spanish, and (maybe?) geology, I had found a major that encouraged me to think critically about the world around me, challenged me to reconsider what I thought I knew was true, and insisted that I sufficiently defend my position. Up to that point, I didn’t realize how much I craved a forum to talk with other people about metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, and logic – people just as intellectually nuts and curious as me. Plus, not many people can say they have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which – unfortunately, it turns out – is not as impressive of a piece of trivia as it should be.
What have you been up to recently?
Work-wise, I am the Assistant Department Head of the Management & Entrepreneurship Department in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Our department is focused on equipping students with the skills and knowledge they need to have meaningful careers. Skills like entrepreneurial mindset, data-driven decision making, project management, creative problem-solving, and professionalism are critical, especially in an uncertain job market. Most of my time is spent in administration, but I also get to teach strategy in our Professional MBA program and strategy and organizational behavior in our undergraduate program. This fall, I am really excited to teach a new entrepreneurial problem-solving course for freshmen and sophomores.
Person-wise, I live in Knoxville, TN, with my husband (Jake), 16-year-old stepson (Yuma), 6-year-old son (Jasper), and 5-year-old daughter (Ruby). We stay pretty busy, but have the most fun playing outside and cooking. I own too many (not enough?) cookbooks and, most recently, have been practicing sourdough bread, wood-fired pizza, and ice cream. (If the higher ed gig fails, I may pivot to a café gig instead…) We visit Chattanooga often, which I have nicknamed “the Northwest of the Southeast”. Spring in the southeast is magic: green, lush, mild, and alive. Most importantly, the mosquitoes haven’t arrived yet, so we spend as much time outside as we can. The heat, humidity, and bug bites of summer, however, is a different story and we try to travel to more pleasant locales during June and July.
How do you think your background in philosophy helped prepare you for the kind of work you are doing now?
Studying philosophy laid a foundation of teaching me “how to think” not “what to think”. I feel more prepared to make sense of complex problems because I learned how to discern the most important elements of situation, reframe them into a logical argument, and identify holes in the argument where more information is needed. It’s helpful when calling BS on someone, too.😉 A significant part of my role as a higher ed administrator is shaping the strategic direction of our department and college. I help to articulate a clear vision and frame my reasoning to positively influence other faculty to support the vision and stay on track toward accomplishing our goals. I have found that relying on logic, rather than appealing to emotion, for example, has been most effective in communicating with my colleagues. I also try to impart this skillset to my students. We may not do logic problems in class (although I have considered it!), but we break down real-life business cases to understand the problem at hand and make logical, evidence-based recommendations to solve that problem. By learning “how to think” and not “what to think”, students are better prepared to approach any complicated scenario with an open mind. Frankly, I wish a philosophy was a required double-major for all university students!
What advice would you give other students considering philosophy as a field of study?
Do it! You don’t have to know now what you are going to do with your philosophy degree after graduation. Before landing in higher ed, I had lots of different jobs, and always found ways to leverage the “how to think” training I received at WWU. I may not reference John Locke, Bertrand Russell, Alvin Plantinga, or David Lewis on the daily, or regularly engage in debates about the existence of free will or if the smallest things are point-sized, but I often catch myself sending gratitude through the universe to Hud Hudson, Frances and Daniel Howard-Snyder, Ned Markosian, and Thomas Downing for educating my mind in a unique and important way that I try to pass on to my own students nearly 20 years later.
Faculty & Staff News
Faculty & Staff News
DAN HOWARD-SNYDER
Winter 2024 began with 15 students in a course on faith and faithfulness. Like the year before, they studied chapter drafts for a book I’m working on, among other things. Spring 2025 saw 14 majors leading discussion of three books and a dozen papers on intellectual virtue, intellectual virtues, and the problem of epistemic circularity. Discussion in both courses was lively, informed, and enlightening. Fall 2025 found me on professional leave.
Publications this year: “Perseverance in the religious life,” with Dan McKaughan, in The Virtues of Endurance (Oxford 2025), edited by Nathan King, a former student of mine.
On the family side, we enjoyed a June getaway to Omak with the boys and their ladyfolk. In the fall, we celebrated our 35th in Portland, kayaking the Willamette. Peter moved to Portland for an MS in marriage, family, and couples therapy. William took off for Princeton and a PhD in biocomputing. We all zoom together for a once-a-month book club, which is a lot of fun!
FRANCES HOWARD-SNYDER
In January, I published a monograph, Cause and Effect in Fiction. I also had a couple of short stories accepted for publication.
I devised and taught Philosophy 397, Philosophy and Literature, for the first time. This combines my two intellectual interests, fiction and philosophy. I very much enjoyed teaching it the first time and am currently teaching a different version of it as a seminar. Eventually, I hope to make the class about fifty-fifty, philosophy and stories.
On a personal level, on June 30, my beloved mother died after a long illness. My sons, my father and my sister and her family travelled to Bellingham in July where we celebrated her life together.
In June, my son Peter moved to Portland to start a Masters in Marriage and Family Counseling program at Lewis and Clark College. We visited him and his partner, Josie, there in September. My son William, moved to Princeton to start a Ph.D. program in computer science, with his wife Hannah. I visited them there in December. It was very satisfying to see both sons on their way to useful and meaningful careers, and involved with strong, intelligent, caring partners.
HUD HUDSON
Since our last newsletter . . . I’ve taught one course on the Rationalists, two on the Empiricists, one on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and one on philosophical themes in Hamlet and Macbeth. I’ve also had the pleasure of introducing 200 or so students to the Philosophy of Religion.
Now that Covid is slumbering, I’ve been able to get out and about again. I gave the keynote address at the 2024 Rutgers Analytic Theology Seminar, and I gave the keynote address at the 2024 Pacific Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers. I presented invited talks to the department of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to the department of philosophy at the University of Virginia. And this May I will be hosted by the Center for the Philosophy of Religion at Notre Dame for a three-day series of workshops on several of my works in progress.
Many of you knew of my ten year friendship with Bear the Shih Tzu who has often had some words of wisdom to convey in these newsletters. With sadness I report that we lost Bear last April. If he were still here, he would ask me to remind you that the world is yours for a season, but time is jealous of you and wars against your lilies and your roses . . . but he would also ask me to remind you that your season has not yet passed and there are many wonderful goods in life to be enjoyed, despite the war with time. Let some of them be interspecies friendships.
Xerxes and I faithfully continue our habit of reading one book every week and posting her reactions online; this April we complete our eighteenth year. You are all encouraged to click the Xerxes link on my webpages each Sunday to follow our progress.
There is honor in being a dog.
Hippotyme and me – looking professorial.
SÙSANNA À'KINLOCHALINE
Last summer, I spent several Saturday mornings at Lakewood learning the basics of sailing. The class was guided by a great crew of enthusiastic and knowledgeable WWU students. I’ve always loved being on the water, so learning to sail felt like a great opportunity to pick up a new skill and meet some new people along the way.
The art of sailing is rich with philosophical musings and life lessons. Learning to harness the wind is an artistic performance, a dance of contradictions requiring one’s full presence and surrender. At the helm is the tacking dance, a graceful, light-footed to-and-fro step and nimble hand-off between sailor and sails and wind and water, interspersed with moments of complete abandon, as one fearlessly glides like a sheet of glass over the water.
As a complete novice, I lacked Nietzsche’s appreciation of dance and couldn’t hear the music. My unskilled two-left feet collided (more than once) and my sailboat capsized (more than twice). Learning how to “fall” out of a tipping boat while staying connected and afloat was ironically poetic. Submerged chest-deep in the cold lake and still reeling from shock, I was instructed to channel my inner calm and use the weight of my body (which was absurdly heavy) to upright the boat while simultaneously hoisting and scooping my uncoordinated self into it. It was both horrifying and hilarious. Nature is a humbling teacher.
Since my four-legged companion Olive couldn’t join me in the sailing class, I added paddleboarding to the mix. I couldn’t wait for Olive to experience Lakewood and the calmness that paddleboarding promised. With a gentle push, we were off. Olive balanced skillfully beside me; her eyes bright with excitement as she quietly took in the breathtaking scenery all around us. While I wavered a few times, Olive embodied a perfect sense of equilibrium. Fearing we’d tip over, I paddled slowly to keep us afloat, while Olive sat serenely unfazed, taking it all in. It was frightening yet sublimely freeing to be out on the open water. Time seemed to stand still, giving us the perfect escape from the routine of our everyday life. As we paddled out further, I was overcome with gratitude for these precious fleeting moments. I gazed down at Olive, her eyes half-closed, still contemplating the trees and sky without a care in the world, and I thought about Socrates and how he had gotten it right. Dogs are great teachers. Our pups, and perhaps all living things, can teach us to appreciate the fragile, temporary nature of our lives so that we can live them to the fullest!
CHRISTIAN LEE
February 2024, I lost my mother and began a personal study of grief. How shapeless and dulling it can be. She was a Western grad. Relentless and so very creative (I fondly recall her deconstructing my childhood bunkbed to create a mock fireplace for our little apartment in Vancouver, WA). She was my anchor. There was more sailing the San Juans and trail-running; frisbee, hiking, and cuddles with Ramona (my sensitive dogter); and over the summer I painted the belly of Moonshine (my C&C 34ft sloop) and installed a new propellor on her butt. Advice for anyone in want of a never-ending and expensive project: buy a sailboat. On the teaching side of things: I created and taught a new critical thinking course; I led a new FIG (freshman interest group) seminar called "Language and Reasoning" which helped me to better appreciate subtle emotional influences on good (and bad) thinking; and over the summer I taught an aesthetics course on so-called "Immoral Artwork."
NEAL TOGNAZZINI
I was on professional leave during the first two quarters of 2024, which allowed me to focus on some new writing projects -- including some student-friendly short pieces on Critical Thinking, which I'm hoping to incorporate into my teaching this year, and some public-friendly short pieces at the intersection of philosophy and beer, which I'm hoping to put together into a book on the human values that inform our decisions about what to eat and drink (such as identity, authenticity, and tradition). I also wrote a standard academic essay on the metaphysics of free will that should appear sometime this year in a special issue of Midwest Studies in Philosophy, and I revised my co-authored entry on "blame" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It was a productive break from teaching!
But I was delighted to get back to teaching in the fall, in large part because I had one of the most rewarding experiences of my teaching career with a group of Honors students who enrolled in my class on Taylor Swift & Philosophy. We read philosophical work on love, breakups, regret, revenge, forgiveness, reputation, and identity, and every day was filled with meaningful and personal conversations.
On the personal side of things (though then again, most of my academic work is also personal these days): I enjoyed playing in the bell choir at St. Paul's Episcopal Church with my 14-year-old daughter, I learned a lot more about city government after my wife Anna took a new job working for the mayor of Bellingham, I got to see the northern lights twice (once here in town and once at the Oregon coast), I learned how to roast my own coffee beans, I went to Disneyland, I taught a 10-week class on tasting beer to local homebrewers, and I was honored to win the 2024 Homebrewer of the Year award from the Bellingham Homebrewers Guild.
2024 marked ten years at Western for me. There are definitely worse places to spend a decade of your life. Looking forward to the next ten!
Bell choir buddies.
Spring break trip to Leavenworth.
RYAN WASSERMAN
I continue to serve as chair of the department while teaching my normal set of set of classes—Metaphysics, Ancient Greek Philosophy, and Philosophy of Mind. I also received a quarter of professional leave this year during which I wrote two papers and gave talks in Claremont, California and Osaka, Japan. Versions of those papers are now forthcoming in Analysis and Philosophia. I also had papers published in Analytic Philosophy (“Todd on the Open Future”) and Ratio (“Intrinsic Properties and the Problem of ‘Other Things’”). Outside of school, highlights included a 25th anniversary trip to Kauai, a 50th birthday celebration for my wife, Christine, and our youngest child, Zoë, going through her senior year of high school. In related news, I am now officially old.
DENNIS WHITCOMB
I published a few papers this year, including one in Philosophical Quarterly about question-asking, and continued to enjoy teaching a wide range of courses. I also gave talks at Vanderbilt University and the University of North Florida, and attended a conference at Brown University. All good times, all full of learning. Maria and I fostered a boston terrier for a rescue organization and adopted a pug from that same organization. Dogs are great. Besides that, the other Big Thing is that I started going to the gym. Nine months in I'm still at it, working out 5 days a week. My goal is to become strong. Monitoring this is difficult, because strongness is vague. My hope is that there is a magic threshold for it somewhere, and that I cross this threshold before crossing the (also magic) threshold for becoming old. In unrelated news, on the farm I learned the value of chainsaw chaps. These chaps function by quickly stopping chainsaws that hit them. Never chainsaw without chaps!
Class of 2024
Class of 2024
Gray Brem
Grace Denton
Alex Easter
Joseph Fitzgerald
Hayden Flynn
Ian Greiner
Benjamin Jakupcak
Maleah Marcus
Brady Marshall
Owen Montefisher
Christina Notturno
Caroline Schmitt
Max Stone
Tanner Wilhite
Congratulations to all our graduates and Scholarship recipients!
Congratulations to all our graduates and Scholarship recipients!
Scholarship Ceremony
Scholarship Ceremony
Philosophy major and scholarship recipient Caiti Grant (second from left), poses with some of the generous donors who make our scholarships possible: Simon Blackwell, DeNora Lombard, and Jeff Lombard (left to right).
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