 Shannon Dea
Assistant Professor
(Associate Chair and Undergraduate Officer)
PhD, University of Western Ontario
MA, Queen’s University
BA, University of Waterloo
Office: HH 329
Extension: 32778
Email: sjdea@watarts.uwaterloo.ca
Web page: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~sjdea/ (coming soon)
Areas of Interest
Early Modern Philosophy, Classic Pragmatism, and
Philosophy of Gender
Academic Biography
I work on the history of philosophy, especially Early Modern philosophy and classic pragmatism. I am particularly interested in how philosophers understand and are influenced by each other, and by other thinkers and movements. This interest manifests itself in my research contributions, which turn out, as often as not, to concern such topics as Gadamer and science, Heidegger and Galileo, Reid and Newton, and Hume and Spinoza.
My doctoral dissertation is just such a project. Peirce and Spinoza’s Surprising Pragmaticism (as it is called) engages the well-known but insufficiently discussed influence by Spinoza upon the 19th century American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce. In numerous texts spanning 1877 and 1910, Peirce overtly praises Baruch Spinoza, and in at least five separate texts written between 1904 and 1909 describes him as an adherent of (Peirce’s doctrine of) Pragmatism. Indeed, in a 1904 book review, Peirce insists that, had Spinoza lived longer, it would have been he and not Peirce himself who founded Pragmatism. My dissertation surveys Peirce’s discussions of Spinoza and offers a pragmatic reconstruction of Spinoza’s thought that emphasizes, in particular, the role that indeterminacy, infinity and evolution play in his work.
Selected Publications
2008: “Hume, Spinoza and the Achilles Inference” in The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology, T.M. Lennon and R.L. Stainton (eds.), Springer.
2007: “Continental Rationalism,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (With Thomas M. Lennon).
2006: “‘Merely a Veil Over the Living Thought’: Mathematics and Logic in Peirce’s Forgotten Spinoza Review” in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.4.
2005: “Thomas Reid’s Rigourised Anti-Hypotheticalism,” The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 3.2.
Selected Grants, Fellowships & Awards
2007: Senior Women Academic Administrators of Canada (SWAAC) Graduate Student Award of Merit.
2006 and 2007: UWO University Students Council Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence.
2005-2007: SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
2005: Charles Sanders Peirce Society Essay Prize for “‘Merely a Veil Over the Living Thought’: Math and Logic in Peirce’s Forgotten Spinoza Review.”
2004 and 2005: Richard Hadden Book Prize for best graduate paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science.
Current Research
I am currently preparing my dissertation for publication as a monograph. Among the matters from my dissertation that I am pursuing further over the course of this are the intersection of Peirce’s and Spinoza’s ethical systems and Spinoza’s indirect influence on Peirce through such Naturphilosophen as Friedrich Schelling. I am also working to understand whether (and how) Spinoza’s necessitarianism is consistent with Peircean tychism.
On another front, I am researching the distinction drawn by the late Cartesian philosopher, Pierre-Sylvain Régis, between the metaphysical provinces of Grace and Nature, and the separate epistemologies that Régis prescribes for those provinces. I also have on my horizon a paper on Peirce’s reception of Descartes.
Graduate Supervision and Teaching
Winter 2008: Philosophy 478/673 – Spinoza’s Ethics
I am looking forward to supervising research areas and theses in topics in the history of philosophy, especially in seventeenth century philosophy and classic pragmatism.
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