Graduate Student Activities

Activities for graduate students in our department include the opportunity to share dissertations, participate in our Reader's Series, and other conferences and workshops that have incredible guest speakers and spaces to engage with other graduate students.

2023-2024 Dissertations Defended

  • Jared Highlen, Hermeneutics of the Polis: Arendt and Gadamer on the Political World, John Sallis

  • Joshua Lehman, At Home in the Cosmos: A Thomistic Personalist Account of the Family, Peter Kreeft

  • Michael Pope, The Conditions of Trust, Richard Atkins and Danile McKaughan

  • Nicholas Porter, Aquinas on Motion, Eileen Sweeney

  • Michaela Sobrak-Seaton, Spirit, Expression, and Community in the Philosophy of Edith Stein, Dermot Moran

  • Nicholas Westberg, Descartes and the Metaphysics of Causality in the Material World, Jean-Luc Solére

Recent Dissertations Defended

  • A Lacuna in the Self: Foresight & Forgetting in Plato’s Protagoras, by Lydia W. Barry (Marina McCoy, supervisor)
  • On Responsibility for Others' Harm: Wonder, Regret, and Accountability, by Magnus Ferguson (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • The Mind–Body Problem for Thomas Aquinas and for Thomists, by Marcus Otte (Ron Tacelli, S.J., supervisor)
  • The Relational Teleology of Francis Mayronis, by Sungho Park (Eileen Sweeney, supervisor)
  • Schopenhauer and the Question about the Immortality of the Self in Idealism, by Juan Carlos Rivera, S.J. (Marius Stan, supervisor)
  • Descending the Animal Slope, by Chandler Rogers (Jeffrey Bloechl, supervisor)
  • Sophistic Threat and Socratic Shield: Education, Inequality, and Influence in Athenian Democracy, by Christine Rojcewicz (John Sallis, supervisor)
  • From Human Dignity to the Common Good. A Study of Jacques Maritain's Integral Humanism, by Quang Tran (Jeffrey Bloechl, supervisor)
  • Améry and The Twilight of Being: A Tale of Resentment, Protest, and Forgiveness, by Matthew Mohorovich (Gregory Fried, supervisor)
  • Relating with the Supernatural in Living Subjectivity in Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855) and Maurice Blondel (1861 – 1949), by Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai (Jeffrey Bloechl, supervisor)
  • Freedom as Self-Donation: "A Hildebrandian Account of the Cooperative Structure of Personal Freedom, by Alexander Montes (Dermot Moran, supervisor)
  • Phenomenology and Ontology (1923-1929), by Vicente Muñoz-Reja (John Sallis, supervisor)
  • The Place of Trust in Plato’s Republic, by Stephen Mendelsohn(John Sallis, supervisor)
  • Soul-Leading in Plato's Phaedrus and the Iconic Character of Being, by Ryan Brown (Marina McCoy, supervisor)
  • Aristotle’s Theory of Dynamics: Examining the Ancient Greek Roots of Process Philosophy, by John Bagby (John Sallis, supervisor)
  • Method in Legitimation: Exploring Lonergan’s Political Thought, by Christopher Berger (Patrick Byrne, supervisor)
  • A Phenomenological Study of the Three Dimensions: Verticality, Horizontality, And Depth, and Their Role In Orientation, by Sharon Joyce (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Decreative Phenomenology: Levinas, Weil, and the Vulnerability of Ethics, by Robert Reed (Jeffrey Bloechl, supervisor)
  • Rethinking Friendship: Fidelity Within Finitude, by Sarah Horton (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Prolegomena to an Ethics: Ontologizing the Ethics of Max Scheler and Emmanuel Levinas, by Zachary Willcutt (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Punishment and Oppression: ‘Criminal’ as Oppressed and Criminal as Oppressor, by Amelia Wirts (David Rasmussen, supervisor)
  • Standing at the Very Edge of the Infinite: Beauty, Transcendence and the Modern Kalliphobic Rebellion, by Ian Corbin (Jeffrey Bloechl, supervisor)
  • Linguistic Correctness in the Cratylus: From the Literary Tradition to Philosophy, by Sean Driscoll (John Sallis, supervisor)
  • Topology of Community in Aristotle: a Phenomenological Approach, by Hessam Dehghani (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Towards a Genealogy of Poverty in Latin America: The Birth of the Police of the Poor, by Martín Bernales Odino (James Bernauer, supervisor)
  • Eros Crucified Sex and Death at the Intersection of Philosophy, Theology, and Psychoanalysis, by Matthew Clemente (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Re-centering the Heideggerian Ontology to Focus on Psyche in Aristotle’s De Anima: An Essay in Fundamental Psychology, by Kevin Marren (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • The Phenomenology of the Icon: Finite Meditation of an Infinite God, by Stephanie Rumpza (Jeffrey Bloechl, supervisor)
  • Contemporary Confessions: Philosophical Engagements with Saint Augustine’s Confessions, by Murray Littlejohn (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Disruption, Conversation, & Ethics: A Study on the Limits of Self-Legislation, by Melissa Fitzpatrick (Richard Kearney, supervisor)
  • Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations: A Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Appendices, by John McCarthy (Gary Gurtler, S.J. supervisor)
  • Uncovering the Roots of Disagreement, by Greta Turnbull (Daniel McKaughan, supervisor)

Reader's Series

Nothing is scheduled at this time.

Conferences

Graduate Students Conference

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