Here is some information about me, John McAteer.
I have been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University since 2010. Before that I held a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor position at Azusa Pacific University and taught as an adjunct at several schools in Southern California including Biola University, the University of Redlands, and the University of California at Riverside. I have also taught online for Saint Leo University.
I have been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University since 2010. Before that I held a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor position at Azusa Pacific University and taught as an adjunct at several schools in Southern California including Biola University, the University of Redlands, and the University of California at Riverside. I have also taught online for Saint Leo University.
I earned a PhD from the University of California at Riverside where I focused on the history of philosophy, especially the early modern period and began reading in contemporary continental philosophy. Before that I received an M.A. in Philosophy of Religion and Ethics from Biola University where I received rigorous training in contemporary analytic metaphysics and epistemology. I began my academic career studying film as an undergraduate at Biola.
My research, publications, and teaching over the past several years have been rather diverse and eclectic but not entirely disorganized. Stated most broadly, I study what makes life meaningful: love, art, ethics, religion, and the connections between these domains of value. More specifically, I study the history of aesthetic responses to the problem of the meaning of life and the contemporary expression of these responses in cinema.
My doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in early modern philosophy as seen in the use of terms such as “moral beauty” and “moral taste” among the British Moralists. My future historical research will examine moral taste themes in the work of other early modern thinkers including Jonathan Edwards, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the German and English Romantics, and the American pragmatists.
I am also very interested in the philosophy of film – both aesthetic issues in the theory of film (as exemplified in recent work by analytic philosophers working in the tradition of Noël Carroll and continental philosophers in the tradition of Rudolf Arnheim and Christian Metz) as well as the use of film to communicate philosophical ideas (as discussed in recent work by philosophers such as Thomas Wartenberg, Stephen Mulhall, and others working in the tradition of Stanley Cavell as well as others in the psychoanalytic tradition such as Slavoj Žižek).
I am also very interested in the philosophy of film – both aesthetic issues in the theory of film (as exemplified in recent work by analytic philosophers working in the tradition of Noël Carroll and continental philosophers in the tradition of Rudolf Arnheim and Christian Metz) as well as the use of film to communicate philosophical ideas (as discussed in recent work by philosophers such as Thomas Wartenberg, Stephen Mulhall, and others working in the tradition of Stanley Cavell as well as others in the psychoanalytic tradition such as Slavoj Žižek).
I plan to unite my research on ethical theory and film aesthetics in an analysis of the way narrative artworks such as films can help us cultivate virtue. This project requires antecedent work on some of the most pressing issues in contemporary aesthetics (e.g., In what sense can we learn “truth” from art?, Is there more than one “true” interpretation of artworks?, etc.). As a Christian scholar I would also like to apply this research to an investigation into the role of religious ritual (conceived as a kind of “performance art”) and religious experience (which I take to be akin to aesthetic experience) in moral formation.
My future research will combine all these areas in a project on the history of aesthetic responses to the problem of evil and the meaning of life. Inspired by a diverse group of writers from Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry to Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, I will argue that mystical experience (whether conceived religiously or aesthetically) lies at the heart of any adequate response to the problem of evil. This approach is helpfully clarified when discussed in the context of films such as Bergman's Winter Light, Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Malick’s The Thin Red Line among others which (in my view) attempt to bring viewers into the kind of aesthetic/religious experience required for finding meaning in the world. In other words my project is to show that some cinematic artworks function as a kind of secular liturgy which allows our post-Christian society to overcome the problem of meaning generated the fact that the death of God did not solve the problem of evil. I believe that this function of art is essential to our society’s well-being because without some response to the problem of evil, then we have no grounding for what Kant called “moral faith” and it is impossible to sustain our motivation to moral action. In short: we must believe our choice to live morally has some meaning, and art can help us retain this belief by forming our moral taste and moral imagination. I have had some success engaging college students on these films at culturally diverse campuses such as the University of California, Riverside, and I believe a popular level book on this subject could be successful.
While my dissertation, professional presentations, and teaching experience are primarily in the areas of ethics, aesthetics, early modern philosophy, and philosophy of religion, I consider myself to be something of a generalist. It is impossible to separate “practical” areas such as ethics and aesthetics from fundamental issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of mind and language. For example, my dissertation on Hume’s concept of “moral taste” required me to discuss of the ontology of evaluative properties, the epistemology of value judgments, and the mechanisms of the human mind involved in these judgments.
My standpoint as a generalist is also made necessary by my interest in philosophy and film. I am part of a new wave of philosophers who are trying to read films as philosophical texts in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum taught us to read novels as philosophical texts. (One of my next aesthetics research projects will be to clarify what exactly it could mean for an artwork to be a work of philosophy.) While ethics and religion are probably the two most common areas of cinematic philosophizing, there is also a large number of films about skepticism, personal identity, and other epistemological and metaphysical areas.
So far my research in ethical theory has been primarily historically based, but I also have strong interest in contemporary applied ethical issues. (Actually, I think the history of philosophy and the contemporary first-order practice of philosophy neither can nor should be entirely distinct from one another.) Currently (inspired by journalist Michael Pollan’s work in The Omnivore’s Dilemma) I have a strong interest in the ethics of food/eating, a topic which includes issues in environmental ethics, animal rights, technology ethics, and even social/political/economic policy.
If you have any further questions about my work, please email me at filmphilosopher@gmail.com.
My future research will combine all these areas in a project on the history of aesthetic responses to the problem of evil and the meaning of life. Inspired by a diverse group of writers from Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry to Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger, I will argue that mystical experience (whether conceived religiously or aesthetically) lies at the heart of any adequate response to the problem of evil. This approach is helpfully clarified when discussed in the context of films such as Bergman's Winter Light, Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Malick’s The Thin Red Line among others which (in my view) attempt to bring viewers into the kind of aesthetic/religious experience required for finding meaning in the world. In other words my project is to show that some cinematic artworks function as a kind of secular liturgy which allows our post-Christian society to overcome the problem of meaning generated the fact that the death of God did not solve the problem of evil. I believe that this function of art is essential to our society’s well-being because without some response to the problem of evil, then we have no grounding for what Kant called “moral faith” and it is impossible to sustain our motivation to moral action. In short: we must believe our choice to live morally has some meaning, and art can help us retain this belief by forming our moral taste and moral imagination. I have had some success engaging college students on these films at culturally diverse campuses such as the University of California, Riverside, and I believe a popular level book on this subject could be successful.
While my dissertation, professional presentations, and teaching experience are primarily in the areas of ethics, aesthetics, early modern philosophy, and philosophy of religion, I consider myself to be something of a generalist. It is impossible to separate “practical” areas such as ethics and aesthetics from fundamental issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of mind and language. For example, my dissertation on Hume’s concept of “moral taste” required me to discuss of the ontology of evaluative properties, the epistemology of value judgments, and the mechanisms of the human mind involved in these judgments.
My standpoint as a generalist is also made necessary by my interest in philosophy and film. I am part of a new wave of philosophers who are trying to read films as philosophical texts in much the same way that Martha Nussbaum taught us to read novels as philosophical texts. (One of my next aesthetics research projects will be to clarify what exactly it could mean for an artwork to be a work of philosophy.) While ethics and religion are probably the two most common areas of cinematic philosophizing, there is also a large number of films about skepticism, personal identity, and other epistemological and metaphysical areas.
So far my research in ethical theory has been primarily historically based, but I also have strong interest in contemporary applied ethical issues. (Actually, I think the history of philosophy and the contemporary first-order practice of philosophy neither can nor should be entirely distinct from one another.) Currently (inspired by journalist Michael Pollan’s work in The Omnivore’s Dilemma) I have a strong interest in the ethics of food/eating, a topic which includes issues in environmental ethics, animal rights, technology ethics, and even social/political/economic policy.
If you have any further questions about my work, please email me at filmphilosopher@gmail.com.
