Dr. Stephanie Patridge

Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Office: Towers 223
614.823.1790
spatridge@otterbein.edu

Degrees

Ph.D., University of Washington, 2006

Areas of Specialization

• Ethics
• Moral Psychology
• Philosophy of Art

Statement

My interest in philosophy can be traced to a single moment. As an undergraduate at THE Ohio State University, with an interest in art theory, I took a class in the philosophy of art. It was this class that not only sparked a lifelong interest in philosophy, but that fundamentally reshaped the way that I see the world. After pursuing an undergraduate degree in philosophy with a minor in art history, I moved on to pursue graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle. While there I continued my interest in philosophy of art, but became increasingly more interested in more general issues of value, particularly moral value and its relation to other kinds of value. Three years ago, I began teaching at Otterbein College, where I completed a dissertation on the moral evaluation of art works entitled "Should We Feel Bad About Feeling Good About Immoral Art? An Argument in Favor of Minimal Moralism." At Otterbein I teach a variety of courses in value theory including applied ethics, philosophy of human rights, ethical theory and meta-ethics, and philosophy of art. I also teach courses in philosophy of religion, symbolic logic and practical reason. Speaking very broadly, my research is in ethics, moral psychology and philosophy of art. Currently, I am working on projects that focus on what I call the imaginative emotions - emotions whose intentional object is imaginative. I am also interested in the role that ethical evaluation plays in art criticism.

Courses Taught
PHIL 120: Effective Thinking
PHIL 125: Symbolic Logic
PHIL 260: Philosophy of Religion
PHIL 350: Contemporary Ethics and Meta-ethics
PHIL 255/355: Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics
PHIL 360: Social and Political Philosophy
INST 250: Philosophy and Human Nature