education

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth; and truth rewarded me." (Simone de Beauvoir)
"We have art to save ourselves from the truth." Friedrich Nietzsche

undergraduate

My training in undergraduate philosophy at Loyola University (Maryland) included work with Timothy Stapleton in Existentialism, with Drew Leder in Philosophy of the Body and in Asian Philosophy, as well as a complete historical grounding in political theory from Plato through Voeglin with Michael Franz.

graduate

My graduate work at Georgetown University (Washington D.C.) extended and deepened the historical/theoretical underpinnings of political theory, with deepened insights into ancient foundations with Gerald Mara, extensive considerations of Liberalist and Marxist thought with Bruce Douglas, the systemic and structural dimensions of these theories were then challenged and deconstructed through the work of post-modern and discourse theory with Mark Warren, my mentor and advisor; while the more intra-personal problems of ‘human nature’ were examined in courses on Hegel, Freud, Lacan (Wilfried Ver Eecke); Conceptions of the Self (Alisa Carse); Existentialism (Frank Ambrosio); Feminist Philosophy (A. Carse) and Relativism (Henry Richardson).

doctorate

I hold a PhD in Political Philosophy from Georgetown University. My dissertation, Escape from Democracy: Autonomy and Ambivalence in the Experience of Democratic Politics, examined the conception of an autonomous self as it is employed by democratic theory, and considered the ambivalence of the experience of democratic politics for a fully autonomous self.

For more details, see pages 2-3 of my CV.