About the Contributors
Editors
George Matthews (book editor) studied philosophy at Pratt Institute, where he also earned a BFA in Sculpture, at Hunter College, Loyola University of Chicago, and The Pennsylvania State University, where he earned his Doctorate in Philosophy for work on German Idealism. He currently teaches philosophy in person at Plymouth State University and online at Pennsylvania College of Technology. His research and teaching interests are in ethics, social and political philosophy, environmental philosophy, philosophy of mind and the philosophical and psychological study of rationality and irrationality. He remains a life-long student, having recently become a formal student in the Mountains and Rivers Order in the Soto lineage of Zen Buddhism. His extra-philosophical pursuits also include gardening, cooking, and wandering and climbing in the mountains.
Christina Hendricks (series editor) is a Professor of Teaching in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she often teaches Introduction to Philosophy courses. She is also the and also the Academic Director of the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (2018-2023). Christina has been an open education researcher and advocate for a number of years, having been a BCcampus Open Textbook Fellow, an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group, the Creative Commons Canada representative to the CC Global Network, and a member of the Board of Directors for the Canadian Legal Information Institute.
Chapter Authors
Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere is a Senior Member of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford and an Academic Visitor at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow/Associate Staff at the Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the leader of the “Developing World” Working Package 4 of the Globalising Minority Rights research group at the Department of Philosophy, The Arctic University of Norway. His works fall in the sub-fields of moral philosophy, political theory, and international relations.
Douglas Giles is Senior Lecturer at Elmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois, United States. His interdisciplinary research interests include recognition theory, how social injustices such as racial, gender, and religious discrimination develop and persist, the ways subcultures and individuals respond to injustice, and how subcultures and individuals develop a sense of identity. He has published and presented in the areas of recognition theory, critical theory, phenomenology, ethics, and religion.
Ya-Yun (Sherry) Kao is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown University, United States. She received her PhD from Rice University and specializes in normative ethics and value theory. She is also interested in biomedical ethics, environmental philosophy, social and political philosophy, and Chinese philosophy. She has taken part in the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Philosophical Bioethics Seminar Series since 2017.
Michael Klenk received his PhD in philosophy from Utrecht University in June 2018. His thesis, “Survival of Defeat – Evolution, Objectivity, and Undercutting,” was awarded the highest possible distinction in the Netherlands. Michael was a visiting fellow at Oxford University, Columbia University, and Harvard University. He has published on topics at the intersection of epistemology, metaethics, and moral psychology in journals such as Synthese, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Ratio, and the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with Delft University of Technology, and from September 2019 to September 2020, the University of St Gallen, through a Niels Stensen Fellowship.
Joseph Kranak is an instructor of philosophy at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. He received his PhD from Marquette University and specializes in Ethics and Nietzsche. Some of his particular areas of interest include duties to self, deontic logic, and free will and moral responsibility.
Kathryn MacKay is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. Her research centers around the nature of power, autonomy, authenticity, social justice, public dialogue, and the functioning of social institutions. Her work is focused on issues of human flourishing at the intersection of feminist political theory and moral philosophy, particularly regarding questions related to health, identity, and agency. She currently teaches courses in the history of philosophy, political theory, feminist philosophy, and ethics.
Jeff Morgan is Associate Professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He focuses on topics in the Philosophy of Religion, Asian Philosophy, and Philosophy of Education. His most recent publication is “Zhuang Zi and the Education of the Emotions,” Comparative Philosophy Volume 9, No. 1 (2018): 32-46.
Paul Rezkalla is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Florida State University and an MSc candidate in cognitive and evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University. His primary research areas include ethics, philosophy of biology, and philosophy pedagogy. Paul is also a musician and plays the oud (look it up!) with Tallahassee’s Middle Eastern Ensemble.
peer reviewers
Björn Freter received his PhD at Free University Berlin, Germany. He then started to work as an Independent Scholar with a strong focus on animal ethics, questions of colonialism and decolonization, African philosophy and political philosophy. Today he continues his work as an Independent Scholar based in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. He is currently preparing to co-edit a Handbook of African Philosophy (Springer) and a volume on the Desuperiorization of Philosophy.
Vance Ricks completed his doctoral studies at Stanford and has taught at Colby-Sawyer College, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and Guilford College. He teaches and writes about moral philosophy, the work of J.S. Mill, and the ethics of (digital) technologies.
Other contributors
Allison Brown (formatting contributor) is the Digital Publishing Services Manager at SUNY Geneseo. She manages OA and OER publications on campus and state-wide.
Colleen Cressman (copy editor) is a librarian who works on open-access initiatives out of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard Library. She is interested especially in doing her small part to increase the free and open availability of academic philosophy to students, scholars, and enthusiasts.
Jonathan Lashley (cover designer) worked in the visual design industry before pursuing his career in education full-time. When he isn’t supporting open, online, and technology-enhanced learning at public institutions across the United States, he enjoys lending his creative skills to projects like this one.
Heather Salazar (cover artwork) is an artist and professor of philosophy. She specializes in figurative charcoals and monotypes, as well as vivid oil paintings of landscapes and objects of meditation. Salazar’s art is deeply impacted by her philosophical research in metaethics, philosophy of mind and East-West comparative philosophy. Her art graces the covers of philosophy books such as The Philosophy of Spirituality (Brill 2018) and Introduction to Philosophy of Mind (Rebus 2019).
We would also like to acknowledge the many philosophy students, faculty and researchers who have contributed to the project by providing comments along the way, such as discussions on the Rebus Community platform when we were originally envisioning the series and what topics should be included, as well as giving feedback on drafts of chapter outlines for books. There have been many very helpful contributions from too many people to list here, and the books would not have come together without them.
