CONTRIBUTORS

But If We Were Part of the Team . . . We Could Drink for Free in Any Bar in Any College Town

Adam Barkman (Ph.D., Free University of Amsterdam) is an assistant professor of philosophy at Redeemer University College. He is the author of C. S. Lewis and Philosophy as a Way of Life, Through Common Things, and Above All Things and is the coeditor of Manga and Philosophy and The Philosophy of Ang Lee. Although he doesn’t have a pair of Incredible Hulk hands or a Green Lantern lantern, he does have a nice collection of Superman T-shirts.

Ashley Barkman is a professor at Redeemer University College. Her recent publications include several contributions to the Pop Culture and Philosophy series, including Mad Men, 30 Rock, and Manga. As a mom of two toddlers and one more on the way, she expects to be sassed in Eskimo talk in due time.

Gregory L. Bock is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at Walters State Community College in Morristown, Tennessee and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His interests include ethics, philosophy of religion, and Secret Agent Laser Obstacle Chess.

Jeffrey L. Bock is currently working as the operations manager for a small web marketing firm in his hometown of Longview, Texas. He has an intense interest in all things pop culture and consumes entertainment in many forms like popcorn. He writes fiction in his spare time. As for education, he easily identifies with and sympathizes with Howard Wolowitz’s master’s degree. Jeff’s “lowly” master’s degree is in history, which he received from the University of Texas at Tyler.

W. Scott Clifton is currently a philosophy graduate student at the University of Washington-Seattle, working in the areas of aesthetics, philosophy of mind, and ethics. When he’s not working on his dissertation, he sits at the feet of Sheldon, Leonard, Howard, and Raj, learning how to live the life of the mind. Bazinga!

Nicholas G. Evans is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, the Australian National University, Canberra. His research interests include biosecurity and freedom of speech and the ethics of futuristic military technology. He has published in New Wars and New Soldiers: Military Ethics in the Contemporary World (Ashgate, 2011), Nanoethics, and TheConversation.edu.au. When he isn’t strapped to his desk trying to convince people the world is about to end, he’s to be found riding his bicycle at unsafe speeds down mountains. He also did an honors degree in physics once, which means he occasionally tears up with nostalgia while watching The Big Bang Theory.

Don Fallis is an associate professor of information resources and an adjunct associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. He has written several philosophy articles on lying and deception, including “What Is Lying?” in the Journal of Philosophy and “The Most Terrific Liar You Ever Saw in Your Life,” in the forthcoming The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy. He is actually a math nerd, rather than a physics nerd. (His Erdös number is 5.) But having enjoyed living in Tucson, Arizona, for more than ten years, he agrees with Sheldon: “Why wouldn’t the Sonoran Desert make a perfectly good promised land?”

Maryanne L. Fisher is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Saint Mary’s University and a member of the interuniversity Women and Gender Studies Program. As a psychological researcher who uses an evolutionary perspective, she has focused on “unraveling the mysteries” of interpersonal relationships “that all started with a Big Bang” and has published approximately sixty peer-reviewed articles on this topic. She is an editor of an upcoming book, Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women (Oxford University Press). Her main research topic is women’s intrasexual competition for mates. She thinks Penny should be happy to have someone like Amy for a friend because who else would “commence operation ‘Priya Wouldn’t Wanna Be-ya’” to get rid of one’s mating rival?

Andrew Zimmerman Jones attended Wabash College, where he majored in physics and minored in philosophy in an effort to unravel the mysteries of the universe. He now works as a science writer, as the About.com Physics Guide, and is the author of String Theory for Dummies. He’s contributed to Heroes and Philosophy, Green Lantern and Philosophy, and the upcoming Avengers and Philosophy and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy. Andrew can be found online at http://www.azjones.info/. He lives in central Indiana with his wife, two young sons, and a growing T-shirt collection that would rival a certain CalTech string theorist’s in geek-filled splendor.

Dean A. Kowalski is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha. He is the author of Classic Questions and Contemporary Film (2005) and Moral Theory at the Movies (2012). He is the editor of Steven Spielberg and Philosophy (2008) and The Philosophy of The X-Files (2009) and the coeditor of The Philosophy of Joss Whedon (2011). Every December since 2002, he has sent Rupert Murdoch thirty pieces of silverware. He now eats with plastic forks, yet his Fridays remain Firefly-less. Murdoch! . . . Murrr-doch!!

Jon Lawhead received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2007, and is currently a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Columbia University. He works mainly in the foundations of the natural sciences, with a special interest in problems at the foundations of fundamental physics, complex systems theory, climatology, and information theory. When he is not banging his head against big scientific questions, he enjoys juggling a variety of nontraditional objects and participating in amateur locksmithing events. He lives in a secret underground lair with his Siamese cat Cerebro.

Greg Littmann Around fourteen billion years ago, Greg Littmann was in a hot, dense state. He expanded along with the rest of the universe and has been, among other things, hydrogen and helium gas, interstellar dust, beautiful sinewy cephalopods, and ferocious dinosaurs. In the late twentieth century, the parts of Greg Littmann came together for the first time, in the form of a simian primate. In this form, he is seized by a desire to understand the universe around him. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from UNC-CH and teaches at SIUE. He has published in evolutionary epistemology and the philosophy of logic and has written book chapters relating philosophy to Doctor Who, Dune, Final Fantasy, Game of Thrones, The Onion, Sherlock Holmes, The Terminator, and The Walking Dead. In two billion years’ time, he will become part of a huge new galaxy when our Milky Way smashes spectacularly into Andromeda, which is a cool way to go if you have to go.

Ruth E. Lowe is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is currently working on paradoxes in political dialogues about minority rights, ethnicity, and culture in modern liberal democracies. Other philosophical interests include law, mind, history, aesthetics, and rhetoric. One day, she hopes to be an actual real philosopher.

Adolfas Mackonis has just recently entered the glorious social strata of Sheldon, Leonard, and Raj as a doctor of philosophy from Vilnius University in Lithuania. He has a spot on his couch where he thinks about logic, philosophy of science, and methodology of science. In other words, Adolfas studies how people reason, how people should reason, and whether people should reason at all. The requirement of being as empathic as Sheldon comes with the territory.

Massimo Pigliucci is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York’s Lehman College and Graduate Center. In his previous (academic) life, he was an evolutionary biologist. He is the author of Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk and of the forthcoming The Intelligent Person’s Guide to the Meaning of Life. He has contributed to The Philosophy of the Daily Show (he thinks Jon Stewart is a modern Socrates but funnier) and to the forthcoming The Philosophy of Sherlock Holmes. His musings can be regularly found at rationallyspeaking.org. Whenever he watches the Big Bang Theory, he can’t avoid the strong feeling that he might have ended up like Sheldon if philosophy had not come to his rescue.

Janelle Pötzsch is a research assistant at the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany. When not writing her Ph.D. thesis on business ethics (yes, there is such a thing!) or essays about nerds, she, an avid jogger, seeks a runner’s high that will “tear the mask off nature,” having her “stare at the face of God.”

Kenneth Wayne Sayles III earned his M.S. in computer science in 2004 from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) investigating the effects of computer personalities on users. He has worked in information security since 2006 and holds the following certifications: CISSP, CIEH, CEPT, CISA, and CISM. He completed a M.A. in philosophy in 2010, also from UTEP, after demonstrating how classical social contract theory can be used to better understand the Internet. His essay in this book is his first contribution to the popular culture and philosophy genre. In his free time he debates which is better, Star Trek IV or Star Trek V, and he often wonders what Penny’s last name is.

Donna Marie Smith works with some of the best geeks in “the whole universe” at the Palm Beach County Library System in Florida. She has contributed essays to Doctor Who and Philosophy and The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy and reviews books on media studies for Library Journal. Unlike Dr. Sheldon Cooper, she doesn’t consider the adorably geeky actor Wil Wheaton to be “Evil Wil.” In fact, she hopes to someday—like Sheldon—be lucky enough to have Wil sign her Star Trek: The Next Generation Ensign Wesley Crusher action figure, which she’s kept mint-in-box for fifteen years.

Mark D. White is a professor and the chair of the Department of Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where he teaches courses that combine economics, philosophy, and law. He is the author of Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character (Stanford, 2011) and has edited (or coedited) books for the present series on Batman, Watchmen, Iron Man, Green Lantern, and the Avengers. He suspects he may share Raj’s pathological fear of talking to women, but strangely enough he’s never had a chance to find out.