Shannon Dea
Assistant Professor
(Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies)

PhD, University of Western Ontario
MA, Queen’s University
BA, University of Waterloo

Office:  HH 329
Extension:  32778
Email: sjdea@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
My academic history involves tentacles, distractions and unusual delays.  I did my UW undergraduate study in Philosophy and Russian as a mature student looking to wrestle with big ideas rather than the workforce.  However, the (non-academic) workforce drew me back for nine years, during which time I was a waiter, a school photographer, a yoga teacher and a physiotherapy aide. When I returned to school to do my M.A. at Queen’s, I thought I’d end up working on social philosophy, especially on issues involving prisons (because of volunteer work I’d been doing with women prisoners, ex-offenders and i.v. drug users), but instead I became interested in philosophical hermeneutics, writing my thesis on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s characterization of how science works. This inspired me to go to Western to do Ph.D. research on philosophy of science in the continental tradition.  Again though, I got distracted, this time by the history of philosophy.  I ended up specializing in early modern philosophy, and writing a seemingly improbable dissertation on the 19th-20th century American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and the 17th century continental rationalist, Baruch Spinoza.  Since then, I’ve remained interested in – and continue to work on – the ways in which philosophers understand and are influenced by each other, and by other thinkers and movements.  However, I also continue to be distracted by other stuff.  Most recently, developing my PHIL 202 “Gender Issues” course has involved me in really interesting new research on the metaphysics of sex – specifically the question of how many human sexes there actually are (and related meta-questions about that question).  And, my undergraduate teaching and my work as departmental undergraduate chair led me into research on the scholarship of teaching and learning – trying to sort out the best way to teach Philosophy. I used to worry about all of the tentacles in my research, but nowadays, I see more and more connections between the often disparate things I’m interested in.  I encourage my students too to follow their many curiosities.  Out of diversity, interesting shapes emerge.

Selected Publications
“Heidegger and Galileo’s Slippery Slope,” Dialogue 48 (2009) 59-76.
“Firstness, Evolution and the Absolute in Peirce's Spinoza,”  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44.4 (2008) 603-628.
“Hume, Spinoza and the Achilles Inference,” The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology.  Thomas M. Lennon and Robert Stainton, Eds.  Dordrecht:  Springer, 2008.
With Thomas M. Lennon, “Continental Rationalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (November 2007). 
“‘Merely a Veil Over the Living Thought’:  Mathematics and Logic in Peirce’s Forgotten Spinoza Review.”  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.4 (Fall 2006) 501-517.
“Thomas Reid’s Rigourized Anti-Hypotheticalism.”  The Journal of Scottish Philosophy 3.2 (October 2005) 123-138.

Selected Grants, Fellowships & Awards
SSHRC Standard Research Grant, “The river of pragmatism: Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant and Peirce,” (2010-2013);
UW Learning Initiatives Fund Grant, “Small-group Work in a Learning Commons:  Its Effect on Learning Outcomes and Student Engagement Among Philosophy Majors,” (2008-2010);
UW/SSHRC Seed Grant, “The UW Peirce Research Centre,” (2008-2009);
Kristeller-Popkin Travel Fellowship, Journal of the History of Philosophy (2008);
Senior Women Academic Administrators of Canada (SWAAC) Graduate Student Award of Merit (2007);
UWO University Students Council Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence (2006 and 2007);
SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, “Peirce and Spinoza’s Surprising Pragmaticism,” (2005-2007);
Charles Sanders Peirce Society Essay Prize for “‘Merely a Veil Over the Living Thought’:  Math and Logic in Peirce’s Forgotten Spinoza Review” (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 (2004 and 2005).

Current Research
I am currently researching the connections that Peirce discerned among Spinoza, Berkeley and Kant, and the clues that these connections give us about Peirce’s distinctive doctrine of pragmaticism.  In a related project, I am working on metaphysical synechism – the view that the universe is at bottom continuous rather than discrete – and its applications in ethics.  This project began with a paper that considers the merits of deploying Peirce’s synechism to better understand human (biological) sex distinctions.  I am currently preparing this article for journal submission. Finally, on a completely different tack, I am finishing up a research project on the effectiveness of small group work and the use of a learning commons in teaching Philosophy to undergraduates. 

Recent Graduate Supervision and Teaching

Graduate Theses and Research Papers:

• The Metaphysics of Sex
• Common Sense Within the Bounds of Philosophy: Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense Defended
• “Natural Deniability: The Character of Negation in Humean Thought,”
• The Episodic Nature of “Blessedness” in Spinoza’s Ethics

Courses, Seminars and Areas:

• Peirce (coming Winter 2011)
• Descartes and the Cartesians
• The Achilles Inference and the Unity of Consciousness
• Spinoza’s Ethics