Biography
Contemporary culture lost the skills required to live a meaningful life. We learn to focus on the wrong values and goals. To get back on track, we must start learning how to approach life to create meaning. A meaningful life is just as much a question of understanding who we are. Only when we find out who we are can we start to understand what we are doing in the world, and when what we are doing in the world tells us who we are, we begin to find meaning in what we are doing.
I believe in philosophy’s power to change minds and teach skills to live a meaningful life. I love teaching the philosophers who challenge conventional thinking, pull the rug out from under us, and force us to re-evaluate where we stand on an issue. As a tenured professor at Los Medanos College in California, I teach courses such as personhood and self, medical ethics, political philosophy, ethics of a good life, philosophy through film and literature, and introductory philosophy courses.
Over the last ten years, as a response to the feedback from these courses, I worked on constructing a theory of meaning as a primary critique of the value-driven theories of self, ethics, and life, which dominate contemporary society. While my interests are heterogeneous, my background focuses on existential and post-modern hermeneutic phenomenology.
I earned my B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Riverside, and an M.A. in Humanities with a focus in Philosophy from the University of Chicago.
