ACPA 2012-2013 Nominees for Office 

Here are short biographies for the candidates for office. Those members whose dues are currently paid up will receive their paper ballot in the “September mailing.” You should receive your ballot by regular mail around 15 September. You will have from the date you receive your ballot until 2 April 2013 to vote. Instructions for voting will be included with your ballot. As usual, you will be asked to vote for one candidate for VP/President-Elect and for at most five candidates for the Executive Council. 

For VP/ President-Elect 

J. L. A. Garcia is Professor in Boston College's Philosophy Department. After earning baccalaureate at Fordham and Yale doctorate (1980), he was Associate Professor in Notre Dame’s and Georgetown’s philosophy departments, and Professor in Rutgers’s (New Brunswick). He has also served as Senior Research Scholar in Georgetown's Kennedy Institute of Ethics and, in 2007, as Visiting Professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics & Philosophy. His work earned postdoctoral fellowships from Ford Foundation, NEH, Harvard's ethics program (now its Safra Center for Ethics), and Boston University, and he has been Nonresident Fellow in Harvard’s Du Bois Institute for African-American Research. Garcia's research--on virtues-based and intention-sensitive ethics, moral law and obligation, the ethics of euthanasia and artificial nutrition, the nature and morality of of racism, the ethics of social identity, and other topics--has appeared in such journals as APQ, P&PR, Erkenntnis, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, and ACPQ; and in edited topical collections from university presses including those at Oxford, Cambridge, Georgetown, and Notre Dame; as well as in Encyclopedia of Ethics, Encyclopedia of Bioethics, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, and other reference works. His writing reached more general readership in Logos, Books & Culture, Society, Oxford Review, and First Things. Garcia has consulted for National Institutes of Health, U.S. Dept of Education, Smithsonian Institution, NSF, NEH, National Research Council, and ACLS. Past member of the Boards of SCP, University Faculty for Life, and the APA’s Eastern Division, he has served on APA’s Committee on Hispanics and chaired its Committee on Philosophy & Black Experience. He sits on advisory boards for the journal Logos and Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, was vice-president of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy in NYC, and participated in the Dulles, Erasmus, and Ramsey colloquia organized and directed there by the late Fr. Neuhaus’s Institute on Religion & Public Life. He is lifetime member of ACPA and is serving a second term on its Executive Council.

John Greco received his AB from Georgetown University in 1983 and his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1989. He holds the Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Chair in Philosophy at Saint Louis University. He taught at Fordham University from 1989 to 2006.  He has served on the Executive Council of ACPA (1999-2001, 2013-15) and on the Executive Committee of the SCP, and has chaired or served on various program committees for the ACPA, SCP and APA.  He also served on the Committee on Lectures, Publications and Research for the APA, and on the Advisory Board for the APA Eastern Division. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of American Philosophical Quarterly and International Journal for the Study of Skepticism and the Advisory Board for Res Philosophica (formerly The Modern Schoolman).  His areas of research are epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion.  Publications include Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (Cambridge, 2010); Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge 2000); Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, co-ed. (Routledge, 2013); Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, co-ed. (MIT, 2012); The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, co-ed. (Blackwell 1999); The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, ed. (Oxford 2007); and "Religious Knowledge in the Context of Conflicting Testimony," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (2009).  He is currently Vice President and President Elect for Philosophers in Jesuit Education.

For Executive Council

Gregory T. Doolan (Catholic University of America). Currently Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy and in the Medieval and Byzantine Studies Program, Doolan received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic University of America in 2003.  His areas of specialty are metaphysics and the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas.  He is author of Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (CUA Press 2008) and editor of the Festschrift in honor of John F. Wippel entitled The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations (CUA Press 2012). The latter volume includes his contribution, “Substance as a Metaphysical Genus.”  Doolan’s writings also appear in the International Philosophical Quarterly, The Thomist, and Documenti e studi.  Doolan is an occasional lecturer for the Smithsonian Institution, and he is a member of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, American Philosophical Association, American Maritain Association, Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, and the Metaphysical Society of America.

Gene Fendt is Albertus Magnus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Kearney, where he has been teaching since he earned his PhD from the University of Texas in 1987 with a dissertation on hope in Kant and Kierkegaard.  He has published 5 books, including Love Song for the Life of the Mind: An essay on the purpose of comedy (CUA, 2007) and Is Hamlet a Religious Drama? An Essay on a Question in Kierkegaard (Marquette, 1999). and over 30 articles in a variety of journals including Philosophy and Literature, Literature and Theology, ACPQ and the Proceedings of this society.  He has won Individual Artist Fellowships for both poetry and playwrighting from the Nebraska Arts Council.

Jeffrey Hause (Creighton University).  Jeff Hause is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Creighton University.  He holds Creighton’s Michael W. Barry Chair and is Director of Creighton’s Honors Program.  He received a B.A. in English from UCLA, a B.A. in Philosophy and Classics from UCI, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell.  Before taking his position at Creighton in 2002, he taught at St. John’s Seminary in Boston, and he has held visiting posts at Harvard Divinity School and the University of Virginia.  Hause’s teaching and research interests include the history of ethics, medieval philosophy, and philosophy and literature.  He has published in Vivarium, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and Medieval Philosophy and Theology.  He serves as co-editor of the Hackett Aquinas Series, and is translator (with Claudia Murphy) of Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Virtue, for which he wrote the commentary.

Jon McGinnis (University of Missouri, St. Louis) is Professor of classical and medieval philosophy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His general research interest is in natural philosophy done in Greek, Arabic, and Latin within the Aristotelian tradition. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Avicenna in the Oxford University Press’ Great Medieval Thinkers Series (2010), translator and editor of Avicenna’s Physics from his encyclopedic work, The Healing (Brigham Young University Press, 2009) and was co-translator with David C. Reisman of Classical Arabic Philosophy, An Anthology of Sources (Hackett Publishing Co., 2007). Of recent note, he has become interested in the exchange between modern cosmology and theism. McGinnis is also active in the “Aquinas and ‘the Arabs’” project and served on the 2012 program committee of the ACPA.

Siobhan Nash-Marshall (Manhattanville College). She is a Professor of Philosophy and the Mary T. Clark Chair of Christian Philosophy at Manhattanville College, where she is also chair of the philosophy department. She received her Ph.D.s from Fordham University (1998) and the Università Cattolica di Milano (1997).  Her specializations are metaphysics and medieval philosophy. Her most recent publications include “Boethius’s Influence on Theology and Metaphysics to the XVI c.” in Brill Com­panion to Boethius in the Middle Ages (2012) and “Bugie, maledette bugie e genocidio” in Vita e Pensiero (2012) . She is currently writing on a book concerning the problem of evil, a problem on which she has published several articles in recent years, including the forthcoming, “Saint Anselm and the Problem of Evil, or on Freeing Evil from the Problem of Evil,” International Philosophical Quarterly. She has taught a wide range of courses in philosophy including an advanced seminar on Boredom. Nash-Marshall served on the ACPA program committee in 2008 and 2012.

Michael Rota (University of St. Thomas, Minnesota). Michael Rota is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas. His Ph.D. is from Saint Louis University (2006), where he wrote his dissertation on accounts of efficient causation in contemporary analytic metaphysics and in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. His articles have appeared in the History of Philosophy Quarterly, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Religious Studies, Faith and Philosophy, and The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas. He currently co-organizes, with Dean Zimmerman, the St. Thomas Summer Seminars in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, and serves on the executive committee of the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Joerg Alejandro Tellkamp (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Mexico City). He received his Ph.D. from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) in 1997. He has taught at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the National University of Colombia in Bogotá and has been Professor of Philosophy at UAM since 2007. His has published in English, Spanish and German on 13^th century theories of the soul and cognition as well as on the political philosophy of Spanish Scholasticism. His publications include: Sinne, Gegenstände und Sensibilia. Zur Wahrnehmungstheorie des Thomas von Aquin, Leiden1999 (Brill); “Aquinas on Intentions in the Medium and in the Mind”, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 80 (2006), 275–289; “Rights and Dominium”, M. Kaufmann and A. Aichele (eds.), A Companion to Luis de Molina, Leiden forthcoming (Brill). Together with Luis Xavier López-Farjeat he has co-edited Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13^th Century, Paris forthcoming (Vrin).

Michael Waddell (Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN).  Waddell received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame.  He began his teaching career at Augustana College, then moved to Villanova University, where he taught until accepting the Edna and George McMahon Aquinas Chair in Philosophy at Saint Mary’s College.  He is editor of Restoring Nature: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy and Theology, and has published articles in The Thomist, International Philosophical Quarterly, Nova et Vetera (forthcoming), and other journals.  His scholarship has focused primarily on Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics, psychology and epistemology, paying special attention to the relationship between nature and grace in these discourses.  Waddell is currently working on two projects.  The first examines Aquinas’s engagement with classical Arabic philosophers on topics related to religious cognition (faith, prophecy, rapture, beatific vision, etc.).  The second is a book length study that explores resources Aquinas’s thought offers for contemporary discussions of intellectual disability.

Jennifer Hart Weed (University of New Brunswick).  Jennifer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of New Brunswick.  Her Ph.D. is from Saint Louis University (2003) – dissertation topic:  A Contemporary Defense of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Theory of Analogy.  Her teaching and research specializations include Medieval Philosophy, the History of Philosophy, and Metaphysics.  She also teaches in the areas of Contemporary Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Religion.  Her publications focus primarily on the work of Aquinas and Moses Maimonides, including contributions to A Companion to Meister Eckhart, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Bulletin of International Medieval Research, and various monographs published by Brill and Peeters Press.  She has been a referee for American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is a regular contributor to the Book Review section of the Journal of the History of Philosophy. She delivered the 2008 Aquinas Lecture at Emory University and is a member of Alpha Sigma Nu.  She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds, and at La Fondation Hardt in Geneva, Switzerland.  She is presently writing a monograph on the logic and language of St. Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides.

John Zeis (Canisius College).  He is Professor of Philosophy and has an AB from the University of Notre Dame, an MA from Niagara University and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where his dissertation committee included James Ross, Peter Geach, and Elizabeth Anscombe.  He has articles in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, the ACPQ, The Thomist, the IPQ, The Monist, and Sophia.  He has previously served on the Executive Council and the Executive Committee of the ACPA, was the local chair of the national meeting of the ACPA in Buffalo, NY, in 1997, and the program committee chair of the 2001 meeting. He currently coordinates the Western New York local of the ACPA.