Appraisal Home

Current Issue

Past Issues

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Editorial Team

Guide for authors

supporting open access

add comment to article

Appraisal Volume 12, No.s 1 and 2, Spring and Autumn 2020​

​ISSN 2514-5584​​

Notes on Contributers

Dr. J. Edward Hackett is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where he lives with his wife Ashley of 14 years. He researches ethics, Continental philosophy and American philosophy, which include attention to Black philosophers and theologians who should be read as part of the canon of American philosophy. Recently, his work in American religious thought includes Emerson, Whitehead, Benjamin Elijah Mays and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s roots in personalism. These explorations in American religious thought are also embedded, albeit unorthodoxly, in Hackett's 2019 novel, Flight of the Ravenhawk (2019), the first novel of a trilogy published by Ink Smith Press. Hackett is the author of Persons and Values in Pragmatic Phenomenology: An Exploration of Moral Metaphysics (2018) with Vernon Press, and co-edited Phenomenology for the 21st Century with Aaron Simmons published with Palgrave Macmillan and was the editor of House of Cards and Philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University in 2013 where he wrote a dissertation on the phenomenological ethics of Max Scheler, and he earned an MA in analytic philosophy from Simon Fraser University in 2008. He received his undergraduate degree from Slippery Rock University in Philosophy and Political Science in 2003 and his Jamesian wanderings were inspired by his lifelong mentor and friend Dr. Theodore Kneupper to whom this piece on personalism is dedicated.

Søren Engelsen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Southern Denmark. He specializes in the phenomenology of value and wellbeing, ethics, and theories of emotion and other affective states. He is currently part of the research project, Elderly welfare and alcohol – a tricky cocktail. The project applies a phenomenological and value-based approach to investigating older adults' wellbeing through the prism of alcohol-related issues.

Abigail Klassen, (PhD, Philosophy), is an instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Winnipeg. Her main interests are in the intersections between social metaphysics and ontology/philosophy of mind. They are also active in research concerning the ontological epistemological significance of othered sexualities.

Jane Kisbey is a Midlands4Cities funded PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham. I am interested in psychopathy and moral responsibility and my research sheds new light on whether people diagnosed with psychopathy are morally responsible for their actions.

Daniel Paksi is a Bolyai János Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Hungarian Academy of Sciences(HAS) at the Department of Philosophy and History of Science of Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) where he received his PhD in 2010. His thesis was on 'The Meaning of the Concepts of Evolution and Emergence in the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi'. His main fields of interest are the different theories of emergence and evolution. He recently (2014) published his first monograph in Hungarian on Polanyi's post-critical philosophy and emergent ontology with the title of 'Personal Reality'.

Alan Ford has been a member, committee member and Chair of the British Personalist Form for sometime, having to relinquish the Chair and active participation owing to ill health. His research interests include the relation of the self to modernism, particularly in the visual arts, the writings of Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, John Macmurray, Gilbert Ryle, PF Strawson, Lawrence Cahoone among others, who have illuminating things to say about the nature of the self. He is particularly critical of much of what is termed 'postmodernism', especially the self as seen by 'deconstruction'. My PhD, awarded by Bristol University, is called Art, Persons and the Avant-Garde: The Metaphysical Presuppositions of Modernism in the Visual Arts. He was a committee member and Newsletter Editor of 'The John Macmurray Fellowship' for some years.

R.T. Allen founded Appraisal in 1995 and published it single-handed until 2009 when a committee was formed. He has published articles and books on most aspects of philosophy. He is currently working on a short book on the tacit dimensions of language, truth and formal logic, and next he will concentrate on a much larger book which will combine the principal items of his more important publications with new additions, into a general personalist philosophy and applications of it in philosophy itself, metaphysics, theology, ethics, politics and economics.