Author Bios

RANDALL AUXIER ticks away the moments of many dull days on a piece of ground in his hometown of Carbondale, Illinois, where he teaches the students of Southern Illinois University about the philosophy of time—and then gives them their pudding even if they haven’t eaten their meat.

 

SCOTT CALEF is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. He has published in ancient philosophy, applied ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. He has also contributed to The Beatles and Philosophy, Hitchcock and Philosophy, South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today, and Metallica and Philosophy. His favorite Pink Floyd song is “Astronomy Domine”, though “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and “One of These Days” are close runners up on account of their sentimental value and past romantic associations. He’s still trying to figure out why ya can’t have any pudding if ya don’t eat yer meat, and how Freud would interpret the line.

 

CARI CALLIS lives in Chicago and travels to the Caribbean to spend time with her Rasta friends whenever possible. She recently shot a documentary about the Rasta healing garden of MacKenzie, without whose knowledge of the philosophy of Rastafari her chapter in this volume would not have been possible. She is a professor who teaches at Columbia College in Chicago and is a ragamuffin wannabe who would wear dreads if she didn’t think they looked stupid on white people.

 

PATRICK CROSKERY first heard Pink Floyd’s Animals as a double major in Philosophy and English at the University of Virginia. His best friend had both this album and Dark Side of the Moon on a single 8-track tape (don’t ask) which Patrick listened to over and over again (as any true Pink Floyd fan will understand). He went on to receive his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, and is now Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors Program at Ohio Northern University. His research interests include the philosophical foundations of professional ethics and the implications of intellectual property for political philosophy.

 

DAVID DETMER is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University Calumet. He is the author of Sartre Explained (forthcoming), Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (2003), and Freedom as a Value (1988), as well as essays on a variety of philosophical topics. Drawing inspiration from “Money,” he occasionally lectures in 7/8 time, only to find, invariably, that the students are listening in 4/4.

 

BRANDON FORBES has an MTS from Duke University Divinity School (’03). He currently works in marketing and communication for Cato Research and is a freelance writer. He has covered indie rock for a variety of publications, including Other Magazine, Thirsty Magazine, and Gaper’s Block. Residing in Chicago, with his wife and two dogs, he longs for his native Southern climes where it’s good to be lost in the wood.

 

STEVEN GIMBEL is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College. He is editor of The Grateful Dead and Philosophy: Getting High Minded about Love and Haight (2007) and co-editor of Defending Einstein: Hans Reichenbach’s Early Writings on Space, Time, and Motion (2006). He has written articles on the foundations of relativity theory, the history of mathematics, the notion of sportsmanship in the Kasparov–Deep Blue chess match, and the environmental ethic of the American Nazi Party. No longer does he consider “Relic” to only refer to a great album and his forehead is no longer obscured by hair.

 

THEODORE GRACYK teaches philosophy in Minnesota. He is the author of three books about popular music, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (1996), the award-winning I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity (2001), and Listening to Popular Music: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin (2007). He’s waiting for Pink Floyd to release Dark Side of the Moon II so that he can watch the second half of the Wizard of Oz.

 

DAVID MACGREGOR JOHNSTON is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lyndon State College. His scholarly interests lean toward aesthetics, phenomenology, and existentialism. As a contributor to The Grateful Dead and Philosophy, he is becoming comfortable with his local reputation as “that stoner-music philosopher guy.” He still has his first copy of The Dark Side of the Moon, and that TDK SA90 Tony gave him is somewhere in his mother’s basement.

 

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN JONES lives in Indiana, where he works in the dark side of the education industry—math educational assessments. He also maintains the About.com Physics site at http://physics.about.com. He’s a writer of various non-fiction pieces and fiction in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, more of which can be learned about at http://www.azjones.info.

 

ERIN KEALEY is currently in the Philosophy and Literature program at Purdue University and contributed to The Beatles and Philosophy: Nothing You Can Think that Can’t Be Thunk (2006). As Erin makes her face up in her favorite disguise, she finds “existentialist” the most appealing. In her work, she is driven by the eternal questions: Is there anybody out there? What exactly is a dream? And, how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

 

ED MACAN is professor of music at College of the Redwoods, Eureka, California. He is author of Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (1996) and Endless Enigma: A Musicial Biography of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (2006). He sighted his first pig on the wing at age fifteen and has been a Pink Floyd fan ever since.

 

SUE MROZ is an Artist-in-Residence in the Film Department at Columbia College, Chicago. She studied at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago before becoming an award-winning filmmaker. She now teaches Directing, Screenwriting, and Critical Studies, focusing on areas such as mythology, dreams, and the movies. It’s official: She is now cooler than her brother.

 

MICHAEL F. PATTON, JR. is an obsessive audiophile who amassed a tremendous vinyl LP collection while working in a small record store in high school. A Pink Floyd fan since he was weaned off the Beatles at thirteen, he helped keep Dark Side of the Moon on the Billboard charts by inflating sales numbers back before all that business was computerized. He hopes that this is not considered a crime, or that the statute of limitations will protect him. Michael lives, loves, and teaches (though not necessarily in that order) in Montevallo, Alabama, where he is Professor of Philosophy at the eponymous University located there. He thanks his tolerant wife, Cheryl, and his sociopathic cats for all their help.

 

Several decades ago, GEORGE REISCH saw Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii at a movie theatre in Basking Ridge, New Jersey and has been a Pink Floyd fan ever since. He teaches philosophy at the School of Continuing Studies at Northwestern University, and has published articles and a book on the history, development, and demise of logical empiricism. He co-edited Monty Python and Philosophy (2006) and Bullshit and Philosophy (2006) with Gary L. Hardcastle and is the Series Editor for Popular Culture and Philosophy.

 

JOSEF STEIFF grew up with pigs, sheep, and dogs but now makes his home in Chicago, Illinois, teaching film and screenwriting at Columbia College. He is an award-winning filmmaker and the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Independent Filmmaking. Now loaded up on Joe’s iPod, Pink Floyd is even more a part of his life’s soundtrack.

 

JERE O’NEILL SURBER bought The Dark Side of the Moon on the day it was released, clamped on his stereo headphones (remember those?), and disappeared into cosmosonic space for about a week. Upon reentry, he studied (what else?) philosophy—at Penn State and the University of Bonn. His primary gig since then has been at the University of Denver, with guest shots at such places as the Universities at Mainz, Leuven, and Oxford. His top numbers are German Idealism, Postmodernism, and Asian Philosophy. He’s published or co-published seven books and a bunch of articles, including a chapter in The Beatles and Philosophy, but still can’t figure out how to sound like Dave Gilmour on guitar.

 

Having written widely for academic and popular audiences on a broad spectrum of topics in rock music, DEENA WEINSTEIN is an unabashed Floyd fanatic, owning all but the Waterless Floyd albums in vinyl and CD. A professor at DePaul University in Chicago, she has taught a sociology of rock music course there for over a quarter of a century. Weinstein takes a multi-dimensional approach to the sociology of popular culture in her numerous publications including Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture (2000), “All Singers are Dicks,” “Rock Critics Need Bad Music,” and “Rock Protest Songs: So Many and So Few.”