Educational Philosophy

As a member of the Program of Liberal Studies, I share in its goal of education based upon an integrated conception of the liberal arts pursued through a rigorous primary-source core education in the formative texts of our culture. I am an unrepentant believer in education through study and active discussion of the canonical works of our tradition, but this means an engaged education with texts and authors from other traditions--Eastern, Islamic, third-world--and a critical perspective on our own traditions. Authors whose writings have particularly formed my own thought include Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, Darwin, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Popper, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Michael Polanyi, and the Documents of Vatican II.

In our Natural Science sequence, I emphasize the actual reading of the primary source integrated with some laboratory work and the philosophy of science. Please see sample syllabi for the Natural Science tutorial for more detailed information.

On the graduate level, I am a strong advocate of a primary source approach to the history of science that is also sensitive to the philosophy of science and to new trends in historiography, social history and cultural studies of science. My students must read and be conversant with the most recent works in the secondary literature, but I insist on the primacy of reading and study of the primary sources themselves. I consider the best approach to the history of science to be a combined contextualized historical analysis that recognizes the autonomy of human thought and the quest for truth.

I regularly offer graduate courses on the history of functional biology since Kant and on the Darwinian Revolution. I also offer private tutorials on several more specialized topics. HPS Syllabus for my current graduate course in the history of functional biology is available at syllabi link above. I will offer a graduate advanced seminar course on Darwinism and more recent evolution in 2000/20001.