SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY & POLICY CENTER

The Center’s Research Fellows reflect the interdisciplinary character of its mission. Research Fellows are     scholars with faculty appointments from a variety of departments at Bowling Green State University. Several of the Research Fellows reflect the Center's foundation in political and moral philosophy, while others reveal the new perspectives that the Center continuously seeks. Fellows are appointed for renewable one-year terms. Through their service on the Advisory Board, Research Fellows advise the directors on conferences and recommend potential visiting scholars. They also serve as panel moderators at Center conferences and other events.

George Agich

George Agich (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the BGeXperience Program at Bowling Green State University.  He is also Professor of Clinical Medicine at the Ohio State University.

Professor Agich joined the faculty at Bowling green in 2005. Previously, he was Professor of Bioethics in the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, F. J. O’Neill Chair in Clinical Bioethics, and Chairman (1997-2004) of the Department of Bioethics with a joint appointment in the Transplant Center at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), Cleveland, Ohio. At the Cleveland Clinic, he became extensively involved in critical care ethics, established the Critical Care Ethics Liaison Service, and restructured the Ethics Consultation Service. He was also responsible for coordinating the Ethics Committees of the Cleveland Clinic Health System and served on the Liver Transplantation Selection Committee and the Advanced Heart Failure Therapeutics Committee (formerly the Heart Transplantation Selection Committee).

He has published on a wide range of topics including autonomy and dependence in old age, bioethics expert testimony, brain death, clinical ethics, ethics consultation, ethics of innovative treatments, ethics in long-term care, organ donation and transplantation, philosophical aspects of psychiatric nosology, quality improvement, and research ethics. He is currently working on a funded project on the ethical and social value issues in drug-eluting stents (des), focusing on the practical ethical lessons for nanoscale scientists.

He is co-director of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB) Network on Ethics Education and the series of International Conferences on Clinical Ethics and Consultation: Cleveland (2003), Basel (2005), Toronto (2007), Rijeka, Croatia (2008), Taipei (2009), Portland, OR (2010). He is also on the Board of Directors of the IAB and serves as Chairman of the International Scientific Committee of the 9th World Congress of Bioethics scheduled for September 3-8, 2008 in Rijeka, Croatia.

Albert Dzur

Albert W. Dzur (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bowling Green State University.

His research is in democratic theory and public ethics, with particular emphasis on the relationships between expert practices, legitimate authority, and citizen participation. He is the author of Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).  Other recent publications include "The 'Nation's Conscience': Assessing Bioethics Commissions as Public Forums," The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14 (2004); "The Value of Community Participation in Restorative Justice," Journal of Social Philosophy 35 (2004); "Revisiting Informal Justice: Restorative Justice and Democratic Professionalism," Law and Society Review 38 (2004); "Civic Implications of Restorative Justice Theory: Citizen Participation and Criminal Justice Policy," Policy Sciences 36 (2003); "Restorative Justice and Civic Accountability for Punishment," Polity 36 (2003); "Democratizing the Hospital: Deliberative Democratic Bioethics," Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27 (2002); and "Public Journalism and Deliberative Democracy," Polity 34 (2002).

In 2005 he was a scholar in residence at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, completing a book manuscript entitled Democratic Professionalism: Civic Task-Sharing in Domains of Hidden Authority.

R.G. Frey

R.G. Frey (D.Phil., University of Oxford) is Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University.

Professor Frey has taught at the University of Liverpool, at St. John’s College, University of Oxford, and at the University of Toronto. He received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1970 and is a Fellow of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. The author of numerous articles on moral, legal, and political philosophy, he has written for the leading philosophical journals, including American Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Mind, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy.

His most recent books are Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (with Gerald Dworkin and Sissela Bok; Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Virtue and Interest: The Moral Philosophy of Joseph Butler (Oxford University Press, 1999). In addition, he is the author of Interests and Rights (Clarendon Press, 1980) and Rights, Killing, and Suffering: Moral Vegetarianism and Applied Ethics (Basil Blackwell, 1983), and the coeditor, with Christopher W. Morris, of Liability and Responsibility: Essays in Law and Morals (1991), Violence, Terrorism, and Justice (1991), and Value, Welfare, and Morality (1993), all published by Cambridge University Press. He is the general and series editor of Cambridge University Press’s For and Against, a series of books in moral, social, political, and legal philosophy which feature two or more authors presenting opposing viewpoints on issues of contemporary importance. 

Daniel Jacobson

Daniel Jacobson (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University.

Dr. Jacobson came to Bowling Green State University as an Associate Professor of Philosophy in 2002 and was also appointed a Research Fellow of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at that time. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He works in moral philosophy and aesthetics.

His publications include "Sir Philip Sidney's Dilemma: On the Ethical Function of Narrative Art," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996), which was awarded the 1995 John Fisher Memorial Prize by the American Society for Aesthetics; "In Praise of Immoral Art," Philosophical Topics 25 (1997); "The Moralistic Fallacy: On the 'Appropriateness' of Emotions," co-authored with Justin D'Arms, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (2000); "Mill on Liberty, Speech, and the Free Society," Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000); "The Significance of Recalcitrant Emotions (or, Anti-Quasijudgmentalism)," co-auathored with Justin D'Arms, in ed. A. Hatzimoysis, Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and "J. S. Mill and the Diversity of Utilitarianism," Philosophers' Imprint 3 (2003).

Jacobson and D'Arms are currently working on a book entitled Rational Sentimentalism, which is under contract to Oxford University Press. Professor Jacobson has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and in 2004-05 was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University.

Timothy Pogacar

Timothy Pogacar (Ph.D., University of Kansas) is chairman of the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages at Bowling Green State University.

Professor Pogacar received his B.A. from Georgetown University in Spanish and Linguistics, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in Russian and Slavic Languages and Literature. His main research interests are in twentieth-century Russian literature and Slovene literature. He is currently teaching Russian language, literature, and film as well as small business concerns in Russia, contemporary and traditional Russian culture courses, pre-college foreign language programs, and professional development on the WWW. 

Don K. Rowney

Don K. Rowney (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor of History at Bowling Green State University.

Professor Rowney specializes in the history of East European state policy and administration. A former Vice President of the International Committee of Soviet and East European Studies, he has held appointments at the USSR Academy of Sciences, the French National Center for Scientific Research, and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan. He has also been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the International Research and Exchange Board. His books include Quantitative History: Selected Readings in the Quantitative Analysis of Historical Data (Dorsey, 1969); Russian and Slavic History (Slavica, 1977); Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Soviet Quantitative History (SAGE, 1984); Transition to Technocracy: The Structural Foundations of the Soviet Administrative State (Cornell University Press, 1989); and Imperial Power and Development: Papers on Russian History from the III World Congress on Soviet and East European Affairs (Slavica, 1990). He is currently completing a book-length study of the state-economy relation in Russia during the industrial era.

David Shoemaker

David Shoemaker (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University.

Professor Shoemaker joined the BGSU Philosophy Department in Fall of 2004. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine in 1996. His dissertation was entitled "Persons, Selves, and Ethical Theory."

His research interests include contemporary ethical theory, metaphysics (in particular personal identity and agency), social and political philosophy, applied ethics, bioethics, and moral psychology. Professor Shoemaker is currently working on a book-length manuscript, “Personal Identity and Ethics.” His most recent publications include “Personal Identity and Practical Concerns,” Mind 116 (April 2007); “Personal Identity and Ethics,” entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; “Embryos, Souls, and the Fourth Dimension,” Social Theory & Practice 31:1 (January 2005); “Caring, Identification, and Agency,” Ethics 114 (October 2003); “The Incoherence/Irrelevance of Non-Reductivism About Personal Identity,” Philo v. 5, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2002); and “Disintegrated Persons and Distributive Principles,” Ratio v. XV, no. 1 (March 2002). 

Steven Wall

Steven Wall (D.Phil., Oxford University) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University.

Professor Wall joined the Philosophy Department at Bowling Green State University in the fall of 2002. He received his B.A. at Duke University, and his M.A. and M.Phil at Columbia University. During 2002-2003, he was the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

He is the author of two books: Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory (co-edited with George Klosko, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) and Liberalism and Constraint (Cambridge University Press, 1998). His dissertation, "Liberalism, Perfection and Restraint," won the 1997 Political Studies Association's Sir Ernest Barker prize for Best Dissertation in Political Philosophy.