Faculty

Professor Geoffrey Ashton recently joined the Department of Philosophy at USF from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, where he also held an appointment as Assistant Professor of Asian Philosophy. Prof. Ashton has studied Sanskrit, Thai, and Spanish, and conducted research at numerous institutions of higher learning abroad (twice as a Fulbright scholar), including Jawaharlal Nehru University (Delhi, India), Deccan College (Pune, India), the Jñāna-Pravaha Institute (Varanasi, India...

  Professor Thomas Cavanaugh teaches medical ethics, a first-year seminar entitled What is Wisdom? (for which he received an NEH Enduring Questions grant), and, more recently, in the Honors College where he offers a course entitled Wisdom’s Lovers: Ancient and Medieval Philosophers. His most recently completed project concerns the Hippocratic Oath, which founds medicine as an exclusively therapeutic practice that especially excludes deliberately injuring patients. In 2018, Oxford University...

Hello, and welcome! In case you parachuted onto this page via Google, I'm the David Kim who is a philosophy prof at the U. of San Francisco, not the concert violinist, the cosmetic surgeon, the CEO of Baja Fresh (featured on Undercover Boss), etc., etc. Sorry, but I can't play Mozart, safely administer a nip and tuck, or get you a job making burritos. There's a film, Grace Lee, portraying the lives of several semi-randomly chosen women named "Grace Lee." With the sheer number of David Kims,...

Gerard Kuperus teaches in the philosophy department and the environmental studies program. He specializes in philosophy of nature / environmental philosophy, comparative philosophy (specifically zen and indigenous thinking), and continental philosophy. He is the author of Ecopolitical Homelessness: Defining place in an unsettled world (Routledge, 2016) and has published two collections: Ontologies of Nature (Springer, 2017; co-edited with Marjolein Oele) and Thinking in the American West (...

Nick Leonard is interested in epistemology, cognitive psychology, and certain topics at the intersection of the two. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University and his BA in Philosophy from the University of Hawaii. In 2015-2016 he was a visiting scholar at Brown University.

Rebecca Mason is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, where she completed her BA and MA in philosophy at Dalhousie University. In 2015, she received her PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. She specializes in metaphysics (especially social metaphysics), feminist philosophy, and social and political philosophy. She also has interests in epistemology and philosophy of language, especially where these intersect with her areas of specialization.

Marjolein Oele is a professor of philosophy and was trained as an MD at the Free University of Amsterdam. She has a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and received her PhD in philosophy in 2007 from Loyola University Chicago. Her primary research interests are in 20th century and contemporary European philosophy, in ancient philosophy (mainly Aristotle), and in environmental philosophy (a research area she recently added). She is the author of the monograph E-Co-...

Jeffrey Paris joined the USF faculty in 2001, teaching courses in topics ranging from existential and postmodern philosophy, to imprisonment, to science fiction, to his current focus on environmental ethics. He has two co–edited volumes—Liberation between Selves, Sexualities and War and New Critical Theory: Essays on Liberation.

David J. Stump is a professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco. A native Californian, he was educated at the University of California and Northwestern University. He is co-editor, with Peter Galison, of The Disunity of Science, and is author of journal articles on Poincaré, Duhem, the history and philosophy of mathematics, and general philosophy of science. His research is centered on late 19th and early 20th century philosophy and science and the exchange between the two,...

Ronald Robles Sundstrom teaches for USF's Philosophy program, African American Studies program, and the Master of Public Affairs program for the Leo T. McCarthy Center of Public Service and the Common Good. He was awarded the 2008 Sankofa Faculty Award from USF's Multicultural Student Services, USF's 2009 Ignatian Service Award, and was a co-winner of the 2010 USF Distinguished Teaching Award. His areas of research include political theory, critical social and race theory, and African American...

Michael Torre received his PhD in 1983 and joined the Philosophy Department in 1989, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He has been a past Vice-President of the Institut Internationale Jacques Maritain, and is currently the General Editor of the American Maritain Association's series of publications. He has taught numerous courses for the Department, and has specialized in the Philosophy of Religion, and in the figures of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, as well as Contemporary...