Photo Credit: Sabrina Starnaman

I am a Professor of Philosophy and the Jo Ann & Donald N. Boydston Chair of American Philosophy at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale); I am also the Director of the Center for Dewey Studies, which focuses both on the study of John Dewey’s life and works as well as carrying on the living legacy of John Dewey.

The main areas of my research and teaching are the history of philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and cognitive science. In the history of philosophy, I focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly on the history and legacy of John Dewey and American pragmatism, as well as the history of philosophy of science. I also work on topics in history and philosophy of science including the role of values in science and engineering, the role and authority of science in politics and policymaking, feminist science, scientific evidence, models, objectivity, the social structure of science, climate science, the history of psychology and cognitive science, and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Finally, I am interested in contemporary theory and methods in cognitive science, particularly related to the emergence of theories of cognition called social, distributed, extended, etc. I conduct research using the methods of cognitive ethnography, especially to the study of laboratory research and education in science and engineering. I am also broadly interested in issues in the theoretical or philosophical foundations of psychology and cognitive science. I also do research and teach in the field of comics studies.

My book, Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science, (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores the role of values in science and the scientific basis of values from a broadly pragmatist perspective.

I am an Associate Editor of HOPOS:The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, and I will be Editor-in-Chief as of January 2025. I am currently on the Editorial Board of the journals Philosophy of Science and Contemporary Pragmatism.

Prior to coming to SIU, I was Professor of Philosophy and History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas, Program Head of the History and Philosophy Track, and Director of the Center for Values in Medicine, Science, and Technology, in which role I organized research projects, put on public lectures and conferences, and advocated for understanding and improving the relation between human values and culture with science and technology.

From 2018-2023, I was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.

I received my Bachelor of Science degree from the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I studied with Jon J. Johnston, David Finkelstein, Bryan Norton, and Nancy Nersessian. I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, where my dissertation was supervised by Nancy Cartwright and Paul Churchland (and I benefited from the teaching and mentorship of many others, including Jerry Doppelt, Don Rutherford, Mike Cole, Craig Callendar, Clinton Tolley, Michael Bernstein, Ed Hutchins, Jim Hollan, and Naomi Oreskes).

On my YouTube channel you can find short lectures from some of my courses as well as examples of my talks on various subjects. Please see below for recent news.