Our Faculty - Philosophy

Professor Dasti's primary research interests center on the classical schools of Hindu philosophy.  His general interests include epistemology, philosophy of religion, Chinese philosophy and ancient Greek thought. He has published in a number of journals and collections that include Apeiron, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophy East and West, and Asian Philosophy. He is co-editor of Free Will, Agency, and Selfhood in Indian Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-author of The Nyāya-sūtra: Selections with Early Commentaries (Hackett, 2017).

Professor Kober works and teaches primarily in applied ethics, with a focus on bioethics. Her research is centered on questions of autonomy and informed consent, with further interests in disability, economic justice, and scientific classification. Professor Kober’s doctoral work was in the philosophy of biology, focusing on the concept of species. Prior to coming to Bridgewater, she taught at Tufts University for four years. Between 2013 and 2015, Professor Kober was Edmond J. Safra Network Fellow at Harvard University. She is currently an Ethics Associate and community member of the Boston Children’s Hospital Ethics Advisory Committee, and a member of the Community Ethics Committee at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. 

James Pearson is the philosophy department’s specialist in analytic philosophy, an approach which focuses on scrutinizing the logic and language of philosophical arguments. His recent work has examined the history of explication, which is a process by which inquirers construct precise, new concepts to replace old, vague ones. He has published articles in such venues as The Monist, Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, and Social Theory and Practice. In addition to teaching Symbolic Logic each semester, Professor Pearson offers classes in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and 20th Century philosophy.