Teaching
Baylor University’s high standards of teaching excellence leading to its 2026 US News and World Report ranking of 3rd in the nation for learning communities is a focus that I appreciate and share. The student evaluation averages across all of my most recent graduate and undergraduate courses is 5.8 of 6.
My central aim as a teacher is to cultivate a community of engaged reasoners: students who can read difficult texts closely, identify and reconstruct arguments, articulate competing positions in their strongest form, and develop judgments of their own through sustained dialogue. Philosophy is learned not simply by acquiring information about positions or figures, but by learning how to inhabit a question—how to see why a problem arises, why intelligent people disagree about it, and what would count as a good reason for resolving it. I therefore organize my courses around a combination of careful textual analysis, direct explanation, structured discussion, writing, and active dialectic engagement. Whether I am teaching first-year students encountering philosophy for the first time or doctoral students working through Kant or Hegel, I want students to leave the classroom more capable of reasoning independently and more able to listen, interpret, and respond charitably to others.