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Having graduated with an MA in May 2010, I am currently on leave from the New School. However, I am happy to respond to questions or comments at jumphreys@gmail.com.

(slightly) closer to perfection

More names of philosophy graduates follow so I want to reiterate: if you would like your name or information to be removed, changed, corrected, sublated, dirempted, or turned on its head, please do not hesitate to email me. As I am away from the New School at the moment, my preferred email is currently jumphreys@gmail.com. I will endeavor to make the alteration post-haste. I also would like to thank Matthew Linck of St. John's College for providing the names of more graduates.

Louis Colombo
Bethune-Cookman University

Lester Embree (PhD 1972)
Florida Atlantic University

Joshua Hayes
Santa Clara and Loyola Marymount

Brendan Hogan
NYU

Jennifer Scuro

College of New Rochelle

Sonia Tanner
University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Miguel Vatter
Instituto de Humanidades de la Universidad Diego Portales

eidos and eidelon

I just came across Megan Craig's webpage: http://www.megancraig.com/ which includes her portfolio. A philosopher and an artist!

Laclau's aside

You seem to remember a time when Brooklyn had a culture that revolved around something other than strollers, foodblogs, and incipient fascism. If asked, you say you prefer the earlier work of Ana Peru (Peru Ana). Perhaps you even think that Philosophy is something more than intellectual therapy, for example, the study of what is and what constitutes the good life. But you’re starting to feel conservative and jaded, stuck in the rut of reading and writing, your only fuel the written records of the Mighty Dead.

Then you hear a talk about something familiar but, strangely, it is new. I had this experience Thursday night when Ernesto Laclau and Katherine Mouffe spoke at NYU. Exiled to a Comp Lit conference from their native realm of truth, Laclau spoke on political antagonism and Mouffe on “the subject as a trace of an other that exceeds representation.” It would be too much to reconstruct or even summarize what was said. What struck me was a comment Laclau made that was really not much more than an aside.

Laclau said that, against Kant, Hegel returned to a negative, Platonic conception of matter. The point, which is in some sense completely obvious, had never struck me before. But if one accepts the kind of account attributed to Plato by Aristotle (e.g. ‘matter as privation’ at Metaphysics A.6) or looks closely at the Hericlitean themes in some of the dialogues (e.g. the divided line in the Republic or Diotima’s speech in the Symposium), then Laclau’s attribution makes a great deal of sense. Was this recovery the same crucial move that propelled Hegel beyond Kantianism?

most intelligent

Generally, New School students are pretty unconventional. Particularly if they are graduate students, and most particularly is they are studying Philosophy. Our friends and colleagues from Harvard, Brown, and Princeton do not often bring up Derrida in otherwise non-philosophical conversations. When they say ‘logic’ they usually mean that of the first-order and not that associated with the Absolute Idea. And not all of them are convinced that on a properly pragmatic reading, Wittgenstein and Hegel are saying roughly the same thing. Yet if many of us are a bit unusual, some of us are most uncommon.

I have in mind one Ronald K. Hoeflin, the founder of several high-IQ societies with names like 'The One-in-a-Thousand Society' and 'The Prometheus Society'. In running these organizations, Hoeflin has edited various journals for the high-IQ community (yes, apparently there is such a thing). He also created the Mega and Titan intelligence tests, for which he developed special methods to measure super-high IQs (usually tests become unreliable above a certain high mark). In a Village Voice article, Rachel Aviv reports that his IQ is around 190. So one might say that Hoeflin is the "most intelligent" graduate of the department. That article also reports that Hoeflin has quite a sense of humor – and a solid command of Freud.

At the New School, Hoeflin studied with J. N. Mohanty, Anthony Quinton, Reuben Abel, and Albert Hofstadter – some of whom are interesting enough characters as to deserve their own (potential and future) blog entries. He completed his M.A. in 1979 and Ph.D. 1987. According to Wikipedia, Hoeflin won the American Philosophical Association's Rockefeller Prize in 1988 for his article, "Theories of Truth: A Comprehensive Synthesis”, which argues for “the interrelated nature of seven leading theories of truth.”

Wikipedia also tells us that growing up in St Louis, Hoeflin memorized pi to 200 places. What is a man of such varied talents doing today? Rumor has it that he is completing the last part of a three-volume work: "The Encyclopedia of Categories: A Theory of Categories and Unifying Paradigm for Philosophy" and living in a rent-controlled studio in Hell’s Kitchen. Could this man be our very own Chas Peirce? I haven’t gotten my hands on the book yet, but it sounds promising…

New School Philosophers

The following list of philosophers from who completed PhDs at the New School is almost certainly incomplete. But it does show that NSSR philosophers are far from inactive. Indeed, the reason I have put together this list and posted it here is to counteract the common notion among NSSR grad students (at one time held by so great a mind as yours truly) that no one hires New School philosophers.

The New School does not, to my knowledge, publish any data of this sort. A good reason might be that the school does not want to play into the hands of the Leiter-Reportesque “professionalization” of the discipline. After all, one would like to believe that an education in the immortal things is not merely a commercial endeavor.

On the other hand, a more cynical explanation of the same phenomenon would be that the New School simply does not maintain such data. This seems likely as the administrative organization of the school is often conducted in the most ad hoc and cursory manner.

I have included only the information from the websites of the relevant academic institutions. For the same reason, the information is often incomplete. If I have omitted anyone or any important information, please let me know at humpj990@newschool.edu and I will make the relevant changes. I can also remove an institution, name, AOS, or year by request.

Bard College:
Adam Rosen-Carole
The nature and status of psychoanalytic knowledge, philosophy and the claims of suffering (pathos, pathology), political philosophy after Adorno and Derrida

Bishop’s University
Don Dombowsky

Boston University
Henry E. Allison
Aaron Garrett

Clemson
Bill Maker
19th and 20th century Continental Philosophy, especially Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche

Concordia
Pablo Gilabert

Gordon College
Lauren S. Barthold

Hobart and William Smith College
John Krummel (Ph.D.1999)
Comparative theology, Phenomenology, Heidegger, Kant, Nishida, Nietzsche, Mishima, Dostoevsky, Buddhist philosophy, Kyoto school philosophy, Existentialism, Post-modern thought, History of philosophy, Philosophy of religion, Death & Dying, Nihilism, Critique of modernity

Marquette University
James P. Flaherty
Classical American pragmatism and contemporary neo-pragmatism

Miami University
William McKenna
Phenomenology, Epistemology, History of Philosophy

Muhlenburg College
Marcia Morgan

Purchase College
Jared Russell
Philosophy, psychology, psychoanalytic studies

Penn State
Christopher Long (Ph.D. 1998)
Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory

Roanoke College
Monica Vilhauer
Ethics, social-political philosophy, feminist philosophy, ancient philosophy, and 19th and 20th Century European philosophy

Rochester Institute of Technology
Katie Terezakis (Ph.D. 2004)
Aesthetics, German Idealism, Political Philosophy and the history of philosophy

Sarah Lawrence
Roy Brand
Continental philosophy, modern and contemporary aesthetics, philosophy of film and new media, and trauma and popular culture

Seton Hall University
Judith Stark
Augustine of Hippo, feminist theories, and environmental issues

Siena College
John Blanchard (Ph.D. 2001)
Plato, Aristotle, pre-Socratic philosophy, metaphysics, Nietzsche, Heidegger, food and politics

Pablo Muchnik (Ph.D. 2002)
Kant, modern philosophy, and political philosophy

St. Johns Annapolis
William Jon Lenkowski
Matthew S. Linck
Stewart Umphrey
Michael Weinman
John F. White

St. Johns College Santa Fe
Anthony James Carey
Russell Winslow

SUNY Stony Brook
Megan Craig
Eduardo Mendieta

University of Alaska Anchorage
James Liszka

University of Louisville
Osborne P. Wiggins
Philosophy & Psychiatry, Phenomenology

University of Massachusetts Boston
Steven Levine

University of Northern Iowa
William W. Clohesy
Moral and political philosophy, German philosophy, American pragmatism, existential phenomenology

University of Windsor
Radu Neculau.
Social and Political Philosophy and in 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy

University of Wisconsin Green Bay:
Gilbert Null (Emeritus)

University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Aaron Vlasak
History of Ancient Philosophy

The Old New School

NSSR students don't have space. They don't have a library. But things used to be really bad. According to John McCumber, who taught philosophy at the New School in the 80s, American philosophy departments in the 70s had largely removed traditional philosophical texts from their curricula as the result of a philosophical culture that had arisen during the McCarthy era.

Indeed, the dismissal of the philosophical canon from American philosphy departments McCumber writes, "provided another, more timely motive for anguish among the people who met in January 1978 in the Manhattan apartment of Charles Sherover, a professor at Hunter College. An accrediting committee of the state of New York - its personnel supplied by the APA - had just visited the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research. The committee had recommended that the program be disaccredited, on the grounds that it was so far removed from he mainstream of American philosophy as to be overspecialized and sectarian." (Time in the Ditch 51)