behold!

Philosophy can be fun.  I find public philosophy on popular culture to be especially fun, and uniquely rewarding.  Since I think it is possible to do the philosophy of just about anything—including fun stuff from popular culture—I have occasionally done philosophical work on some of my favorite forms of entertainment and media.

Also, I often learn cool and important new things about scholarly and technical topics when I try to present those topics in fun and accessible ways to novel audiences.  So, I have sometimes presented even my traditional academic work in more popular, public venues.

I have done interviews and other forms of press on both kinds of work—the fun stuff, and the technical stuff done in a fun way.  For those who are interested, I will survey some of my experience working on / in popular and public philosophy here.

you can read a blog post I wrote for extinct >

I started doing public philosophy while in graduate school in San Diego.  During that time, I regularly attended Comic-Con as a panelist and presenter—discussing issues such as copyright and fair use in comics and education, as well as works like Asterios Polyp and Logicomix.  I have attended and presented a poster at the annual Comics Arts Conference several times.

I also wrote a couple of chapters for books on the philosophy of video games in Open Court's Popular Culture and Philosophy series.  I have written about Zelda from a feminist perspective, and used Master Chief from Halo as a way of introducing and exploring classic philosophical puzzles about personal identity.

I have been interviewed about my work on comics, video games, and philosophy by outlets like Print Mag and the Official Xbox Magazine (for a special issue on the 10th anniversary of Halo).  I have guest-blogged at Comics Forum on the topic of using comics inclusively in the classroom.

During my postdoctoral stint at the Field Museum, I got to see many skilled science communicators in action, and this prompted me to try and develop some philosophy-of-science communication skills of my own.

I have written quite a few posts for Extinct, the philosophy of paleontology blog, which I co-founded with three other wonderful philosophers of paleontology (Adrian Currie, Leonard Finkelman, and Derek Turner).  Max Dresow is running the blog now (thanks, Max!).

I have also written for the blog of Oxford University Press on the topic of whether birds are dinosaurs (they are), and how we can tell.  And I was a guest on The Brain Scoop with Emily Graslie for an episode called The First Brachiosaurus.

In sum, I enjoy practicing philosophy outside the academy—in addition to doing more typical academic work such as writing technical articles, teaching university students, and serving on endless committees.  I like to do serious philosophy about fun things, and I like to make the philosophy of serious things more fun than you might have expected it to be!

Also, in case you cannot already tell, I play a lot of TTRPGs (and other games).

faqs

yeah I painted these minis