teaching

Computing technology is here to stay, and the decisions we make concerning how to use this technology

really are fundamentally moral decisions. This course addresses the application of moral theories, ethical principles, and professional codes to

ethical dilemmas faced by business professionals, employers, and employees. Topics covered include predatory monetization in video games, cell phone overuse, epistemic effects of search engines, the spread of misinformation, social media, rights for AI systems, social implications of automation, ethical issues of virtual reality, and more.

PHIL 2326, Taught Summer I (2026) and Summer II (2026)

Gloria Anzaldúa conceives of the Borderlands as “una herida abierta where the Third World

grates against the first and bleeds.” This course examines the special health and environmental challenges faced by individuals,

communities, health care institutions, and governmental agencies in border regions. Topics include

migrant health and access to healthcare, obesity and diabetes, mental health, linguistic, cultural, and

economic barriers to health care, and prolonged detention. Whenever possible, topics will be drawn

from challenges present in the Rio Grande Valley. This course will allow students to explore the

multifaceted components of these complex issues and develop solutions to improve health and well-

being in the epidemiological region along the US-Mexico border.

Cross-listed BIET 6340/PHIL 4300, Taught Spring 2026

Medicine is a social institution that touches many of the most important parts of our lives. The practice of medicine is in part practical and scientific but it also part art, and in each of these endeavors, medicine is most certainly made up of assumptions, assertions and questions that are worth interrogating philosophically. This course examines the nature, structure and experience of health, disease and illness, focusing on epistemological, metaphysical, and policy issues in biomedical research, theory, and practice. Topics include medical ontology, causality, methods of reasoning, evidence in clinical trials, phenomenology, narrative, disability, mental illness, privatized medicine, health care and more. Students will engage major texts and case studies in the history and philosophy of medicine, with the objective of providing a theoretical and philosophical framework for analyzing, evaluating and generating solutions to contemporary debates and experiences relating to health, disease and illness. 

BIET 6315, Taught Fall 2025

This course introduces students to the ethical dimensions of health care practice as well as the broader methodological frameworks for evaluating bioethical issues. Health professionals are faced with ethical decisions which result from advances in technology, health inequities, economic constraints, and broader issues of social justice. Students will be introduced to theoretical approaches to bioethics such as normative reasoning, casuistry, principlism, and narrative reasoning and apply them to issues such as end of life care, genetic research and treatment, resource allocation, reproductive care, mental health, and organ procurement and transplantations. Students will learn to integrate bioethical knowledge into patient care, administrative decisions, and health policy.

BIET 6300, Taught Fall 2025

This class deals with formal standards for deductive reasoning. The students will learn to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments, and will acquire formal techniques for establishing validity, consistency, logical truth and other logical properties. We will examine two general types of argument: those whose validity depends exclusively on the features of sentential connectives (such as ‘not’ and ‘and’), and those which also depend on the behavior of quantifiers (like ‘all’ and ‘some’). The former are the subject matter of sentential logic, to which we will devote the first part of the course; the latter concern predicate logic, the topic of the second part. 

PHIL 3200, Taught Summer 2024 as co-instructor with Maximino Robles

Feminism and philosophy of science have been involved since the late 20th century, when philosophers of science turned a critical eye on traditional concepts of the nature of scientific knowledge, scientific objectivity and the scientific method. Feminist philosophers of science point out that women have traditionally been excluded from scientific inquiry and institutions, which reinforces existing social hierarchies. They suggest diverse accounts of how to overcome such hierarchies, and engage such questions as: how does objective knowledge relate to actual human and scientific practice? Is objective knowledge possible? What is the relationship between knowledge and gender? How does science contribute to existing social hierarchies? Answering these questions invoke responses from philosophers in a variety of areas, including philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, epistemology, and naturalism, among others. This course will survey these contributions and discuss influential works in the areas noted above. Key topics include: objectivity, feminist standpoint theory, epistemic injustic and the role of values in scientific inquiry.

PHIL 3380, Taught Fall 2022

We often praise or condemn others on account of their reasoning skills. We admire scientists for reasoning well from empirical evidence to hypotheses. Sherlock Holmes criticizes Watson for missing

an "elementary" inference from the evidence of a case to the culprit. And you might argue with your peers about whether they have made reasonable decisions in their personal lives. This course introduces the student to the philosophical study of such human reasoning. We will investigate the

following questions (along with others) in this course: What does it mean to reason well? What sorts of things can be reasonable (beliefs, hypotheses, decisions, etc.)? What are the standards of good reasoning? Do humans typically meet these standards? In this course, students develop a better understanding of human reasoning. Accordingly, such

students will learn to be better reasoners themselves.

PHIL 1250, Taught Summer 2023 as co-instructor with Qining Guo

From the scientific revolution, through logical positivism and Darwinian evolution, students in this class will interrogate key moments in the history of science by investigating the work of figures such as Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin with a philosophical lens. These primary texts will be considered using methods modeled by philosophers of science and applied to cases in the history of science. We will investigate scientific paradigm shifts, what constitutes a scientific theory, scientific advances and pitfalls. Students will also learn the beginnings of some technical methods in philosophy including basic deductive logic.

PHIL 3350, Taught Summer 2022 as co-instructor with Caleb Hylkema and Summer 2021 as co-instructor with TJ Perkins

Genes are the basic unit of heredity. Genes inherited from our parents play a significant role in who we are as people both in personality and physical appearance. Throughout history, genetics has been used not just for scientific purposes, but has provoked many ethical and social questions that are worth considering even within the sciences. One might ask how much genetics should be prioritized in the biological sciences? Is it ethical to use genetics to choose to have a child? How can we use genetic testing to learn more about our family’s past? How can we leverage the knowledge we gain from genetic science to cure diseases and create vaccines? How do we, and should we, use genetics to bring back extinct species? What can we learn about science generally with an analysis of the practices of genetic sciences? This class is designed to address some of these questions by sampling debates surrounding genetics in the world today with a particular focus on the intersection of philosophy with the history, biology, psychology, and sociology of genetics.

PHIL 3310, Taught Summer 2020 as co-instructor with TJ Perkins

This course is designed to introduce students to a sample of the debates surrounding race in America, with a particular focus on the science of race and racism. At the end of the class, students will:

·   Understand how efforts to create and divide up different biological races were tied to economic and societal interests in things like slavery, anti-immigration policies, and anti-miscegenation laws.

·   Become familiar with lessons from psychological research that reveal how people think about and act towards members of other racial groups without even necessarily being conscious of that thinking/acting process.

·   Appreciate how race has been used throughout history as a means to dehumanize people from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. 

PHIL 3310, served as Teaching Assistant Spring 2019 for James Tabery

The goals of this course are to teach the fundamental elements of literary analysis, and to provide students with the proper analytical tools and background information for a fruitful

encounter with great literary works from a wide range of cultural traditions. The course work will enable students to appreciate and to analyze critically texts from diverse genres, periods, and cultural traditions, and to further develop crucial writing and communication skills.

WLIT 1123, Taught Spring 2018

This course has as a goal to continue to teach students the research and writing strategies and processes emphasized in Composition I but doing so through the analysis of the discursive and writing practices in their chosen fields of study.  Students will reflect on writing as a communicative practice and will write critical essays that demonstrate sound argumentation, development of ideas, clear organization, effective analysis, awareness of writing conventions, and mastery of standard linguistic forms.

ENGL 1023, Taught Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Spring 2017

Creative Writing I is a beginning-level workshop course in which you’ll write and critique original poems and short stories. You’ll also read established writers in each genre in order to discuss craft.

ENGL 2023, Taught Spring 2017

This course serves to teach students how to conduct research using written sources from across the curriculum, and to teach them to draft, revise, and edit their researched essays to demonstrate sound argumentation, development of ideas, clear organization, accurate analysis, awareness of writing conventions, and mastery of standard linguistic forms.

ENGL 1013, Taught Fall 2015