PHILOSOPHY @ UNT - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Adam Briggle is a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in our Department. He holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado and served for three years as a postdoctoral fellow working on the philosophy of technology at the University of Twente in The Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of ethics and policy with science and technology. He is author of A Rich Bioethics: Public Policy, Biotechnology, and the Kass Council (2010, University of Notre Dame Press), co-author of Ethics and Science: An Introduction (2012, Cambridge University Press), and co-editor of The Good Life in a Technological Age (2012, Routledge Press). He is also the author of A Field Philosopher's Guide to Fracking (2015, Liveright Press) and co-author with Robert Frodeman of Socrates Tenured: The Institutions of 21st Century Philosophy (2016, Rowman & Littlefield). He is a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Philosophy & Technology and serves on the Executive Committee of the Public Philosophy Network.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Coordinator
I graduated in Philosophy and Philosophical Sciences from the University of Milan, and later specialized in Environmental Management Conservation at the University of Stirling, conducting research on the reintroduction of beavers in the Scottish Highlands. With prior experience in rewilding initiatives across Europe, including management of eucalyptus in Spain and cohabitation with large carnivores in Finland, I am currently pursuing my PhD within the framework of environmental ethics and critical animal studies. My areas of research encompass rewilding, multispecies justice, human overpopulation, inter-species coexistence, and the philosophy of polyamory.
Austin has over 6 years of industry experience in one of the world's largest food and beverage organizations, leading large teams to implement digital solutions in business-to-business sales, supply chain management, and organizational sustainability. He graduated with honors from the University of North Texas in 2017 with a B.B.A. in Business Analytics, and he is currently an M.A. in Philosophy candidate with an expected graduation of December 2023. As an Eagle Scout from the Boy Scouts of America and with a childhood in rural North Texas, Austin's core interests lie at the intersection of built environments and energy transitions to create a more sustainable human co-existence. Austin plans to apply his education in the private sector immediately. Eventually, he intends to partner with municipalities to drive more holistic consideration of human habitats within the broader non-human environment.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Student and Teaching Assistant
Ben Larsen is a PhD student and teaching assistant. He is interested in processes, such as park design and animal domestication, that find humans at once shaping and experiencing (or shaping experiences of) the natural world.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Specialist, Graduate Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy
- Professor, Chair
David M. Kaplan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. He is author of Food Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2019), editor of The Philosophy of Food (University of California Press, 2012) and editor of the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, 2nd edition (Springer, 2019). He has published articles on food technologies, genetically-modified food, artificial ingredients, and junk food.
He also manages the Philosophy of Food Projec t.
He used to work on philosophy of technology, and the social-political thought of Paul Ricoeur and the critical theory-hermeneutics debates.
Dr. Kim De Wolff received her PhD in Communication and Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her research connects global ecological crises to cultures of consumption and waste, taking an interdisciplinary approach to address big environmental questions about everyday life. She is co-editor of Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures, and is currently working on a monograph about the "garbage patch" of waste circulating in the North Pacific Ocean.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Director of the Water Project
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus
Kevin is a PhD student and teaching fellow in the Philosophy and Religion department of the University of North Texas. He is currently interested in exploring Deleuzian metaphysics, and how they pertain to contemporary politics of aesthetics. He also works at a local organic farm.
Lance Gracy is a Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. His dissertation is an exegesis of wisdom in St. Bonaventure's Collationes in Hexaëmeron. In exegeting/articulating this last great work of the "second-founder" of the Franciscan Order, Lance's dissertation conveys the "return to the wisdom of metaphysics and religion" as not only a return to exhortative and propaedeutical reading and instruction, sound doctrine, (re)conciliation, and so on, but also as something importantly related to the environment and ecology. Thus, one implication is that through a return to the wisdom of metaphysics of religion, one properly reorients themselves to the time, status, nature, being(s), etc. of creation.
Lance has also been involved with various organizations in support of an environmental focus, to include the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center, the St. Basil Institute for the Theology of Creation, and American Pilgrims on the Camino.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Professor
MARTIN D. YAFFE, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, earned a B.A. from University of Toronto and a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He has taught at University of North Texas since 1968, and at Tel Aviv University in 1971-72. His research interests include political philosophy and Jewish thought. His book publications include: Shylock and the Jewish Question (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Judaism and Environmental Ethics: A Reader (Lexington Books, 2001); and a translation of Benedict Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise of 1670 (Focus Philosophical Library/Hackett, 2004), the philosophical founding document of both modern scientific biblical criticism and modern liberal democracy. He is currently at work on a translation (from the Latin) of Francis Bacon's New Organon of 1620, the philosophical founding document of modern science and technology; and a co-translation (from the German) of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan the Wise of 1779, a dramatic probing of the question of religious toleration.
Job Titles:
- Professor, Philosophy & Religion / Biological Sciences, Director, Sub - Antarctic Biocultural Conservation Program, Profesor Titular, Universidad De Magallanes ( UMAG ), Chile
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies