About Me

As a tenured, full professor I taught critical thinking, moral and political philosophy, and East Asian philosophy at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan until the College closed its undergraduate programs in Fall of 2017. I got my Ph.D. in philosophy from Wayne State University (also in Detroit) in 2003. I did my dissertation on human rights there, and spent some time as a Senior Lecturer in the Irvin Reid Honors College there before leaving academia in 2019.  My published work centers on questions of normativity in argumentation, the historical relationship between philosophical thinking about argument and about moral judgment, on disagreement and cooperative intentionality in argumentation, and on the ontology of argument. I’ve also written on visual argumentation. In the past I was a Visiting Research Fellow with CRRAR at the University of Windsor from 2009-2013. I’ve also served on the Board of AILACT. My blog RAIL (on which I rarely publish anymore) is devoted to scholarly issues around reasoning, argumentation, informal logic and critical thinking. There are still great collections of resources for those doing research in these areas there.

Finally a disclaimer, for the sake of clarity: I am not this person. We just have the same name and a background in philosophy. It’s weird, I know, but please be assured that we are in fact different people. (We’ve never met.)

All opinions on this blog and the rest are solely my own.