The Department of Philosophy provides opportunities for undergraduate students to do independent research for academic credit in a wide variety of areas.
Students wishing to do independent research in some area of philosophy must have some background in the general area. Independent research projects are often stimulated by course work. After taking a course in a certain area, topic, or philosopher, a student may want to investigate, in greater detail, some aspect or question raised in or by the course. A course in Plato, for example, may stimulate a research interest in a particular scholarly question or problem that goes well beyond what is covered in the course. The student's project will generally include: (a) formulating a good researchable question; (2) doing the research and critical reflection necessary to answer it; and (c) writing a substantial, self-contained paper explaining the question and the results of the research and reflection.
The following faculty members have indicated a willingness to supervise undergraduate research for academic credit in the areas listed. Students interested in doing research in a particular area should contact the particular faculty member. Whether or not a faculty member will agree to supervise a particular research project will depend on the student's background and understanding and the faculty member's other commitments for a specific semester. As a rule, faculty can only supervise a limited number of independent graduate and undergraduate research projects in a given semester.
Judith A. Andre andre@msu.edu |
Ethics and bioethics, including international public health. |
Peter D. Asquith |
Topics in Philosophy of Science and Science Studies, Topics in Informal Logic. |
Stephen L. Esquith |
Topics in democratic theory, distributive justice and international ethics, with a special interest in genocide, truth commissions, war crimes tribunals, and the ethics of development. |
Leonard Fleck |
Topics in health care ethics [resource allocation and health care justice, ethical issues related to genetics], health care policy, rational democratic deliberation. |
Fred Gifford |
Topics in health care ethics (human experimentation, genetics) and philosophy of biology and medicine. |
Hilde Lindemann |
Topics in feminist ethics and feminist epistemology, moral theory, topics in bioethics. |
Matthew W. McKeon |
Topics (and/or philosophers who work in) philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology (especially on a priori knowledge), metaphysics (especially on the realism vs irrealism issue, and on the nature of time and space). |
Debra Nails |
Current philosophical topics that can be clarified by understanding ontological, epistemological, and political discussions in Plato and Spinoza; feminist ethics; presocratic ontology and logic; Aristotle's ethics, aesthetics, and politics; Leibniz's ontology and epistemology; Kant's and Nietzsche's ethics and aesthetics; Davidson's Platonism and Spinozism; and Quine's epistemology. |
James L. Nelson |
Topics in bioethics (e.g., proxy consent, reproductive technologies, justice in distribution of health care, disability and gender related issues, etc.). Topics in moral theory (e.g., realist/anti-realist debates, moral epistemology, particularism). Selected topics in philosophy of mind and language (externalism; the thought of Wittgenstein; causal theories of reference.) |
Robert Pennock |
Topics in biomedical ethics (esp. Genetic technologies, research ethics) and philosophy of science (esp. philosophy of biology, artificial life, scientific evidence and methodology). |
Richard T. Peterson |
Topics in 19 and 20th century continental philosophy (especially German and French thought), in aesthetics, critical social theory, and political philosophy; and particular topics in recent social thought, for example, mass media, race and racism, violence, and human rights. |
Fred Rauscher |
Topics in the history of philosophy (esp. 17th-18th-19th Centuries), moral theory (esp. metaethics, moral realism, methodology), and try me in areas related to evolution and human behavior, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. |
Jim Roper |
Philosophy of science with special emphasis on the old and new problems of induction. Business ethics: the relationship between, "the public philosophy of business," and democratic theory. Political philosophy, especially the relationship between government authority and economics. |
Lisa H. Schwartzman |
Topics in feminist theory, social and political philosophy, and ethics. |
Daniel P. Steel |
Philosophy of science, particularly, explanation, causation, confirmation, philosophy of social science, and philosophy of biology. Current research includes work on causal inference in social science, reductionism in biology, and fundamental principles in causal inference. |
Jennifer Susse |
Topics in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. |
Paul B. Thompson |
Topics in environmental philosophy and philosophy of technology. |
