Joe Swenson
Joe Swenson is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy. He earned a BA in Philosophy and English from Hamline University, an MA in Philosophy from Baylor University, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main teaching and research interests include ethical theory and applied ethics (including bioethics), the philosophy of art, and nineteenth and twentieth-century continental philosophy.
Courses taken with Swenson typically involve a mixture of lecture and discussion that explore philosophical topics and questions from both historical and contemporary perspectives. A special emphasis in all of his courses involves making strong interdisciplinary connections between the study of philosophy and other majors and courses offered at Hamline.
“The study of philosophy involves asking big reflective questions about values, experience, history, and knowledge. A basic goal that I set for all of my classes is to help students explore how and why the big questions that they encounter in our classroom really do apply to their own daily lives. Once discovered, philosophy is everywhere. Learning to engage in careful reading, thoughtful discussion, and critical writing all play a significant role in that discovery.” —Joe Swenson
