I grew up in South-east Asia in the city-state of Singapore. At the age of 19, I went to Australia to study economics at the University of Melbourne. There I experienced kangaroos, Aussie rules ‘footy’, cricket, pub crawls...and philosophy. I took my first philosophy class, reading Plato’s Republic and Descartes’ Discourse on Method, and I never looked back. I added a philosophy major and when I returned to Singapore, I wrote a Master’s thesis at the local university, then applied to graduate schools to earn a doctorate in philosophy. I ended up in ‘laid back’ California at Stanford University in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area where I spent five wonderful years.
I have joined UAB after many years of teaching at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point where I became a ‘Cheesehead’ or Packers fan. (In baseball, I still follow the San Francisco Giants. My most memorable year was 2010 when the Giants won the World Series, and the Packers won the SuperBowl!). Stevens Point is typical small-town America, surrounded by corn fields and dairy farms, and typified by ‘Midwest nice’-ness. Now that I have moved to the hospitable South, not only can I claim to have lived and studied on 3 continents, but I have experienced living in three very different parts of the United States. (I never lived in Europe, but I have done the back-packing thing travelling by train with a copy of Let’s Go Europe!)
UAB is known for medical and health-related studies, and the philosophy department has a tradition in teaching bioethics, and publishing important ethics textbooks. For philosophy majors, the department is able to offer all core areas of philosophy as well as introducing many of the latest topics of philosophical research. I am bringing to UAB new courses in the ethics of war, virtue ethics, and philosophy of action. I will draw on a long professional career and my global experience as I teach classes on these and other subjects in philosophy. I hope students will join me in finding philosophy to be exciting and life-changing.
