Dr. Ian M. Church
I am an associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College, and I am the director of the Arete Research Center for Philosophy, Science, and Society. My areas of specialization are epistemology and the philosophy of psychology. My current research interests include work on experimental philosophy, group belief and group virtue, the nature of luck, the Gettier problem, intellectual virtues, disagreement, non-reductive models of knowledge, heuristics and biases, the social situatedness of reasoning, and religious epistemology.
I am the author of many articles and several books including, Virtue Epistemology and the Analysis of Knowledge (2023) and Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science (with Peter Samuelson, 2017). I'm currently working on a monograph applying the tools and resources of experimental philosophy to seminal debates within philosophy of religion. The provisional title is The Data Beyond Dogma.
I earned my PhD and MLitt in philosophy from the St Andrews-Stirling Joint Programme and my BA in philosophy and rhetoric & composition English at Ball State University. My hobbies include strength training, travel, chess, ichthyology, and academic ancestry.
My wife and I have been married for 18 years and have four children. The header is a picture of Saligo Bay on Islay, Scotland.
Public Lecture
On my research on experimental philosophy and the problem of evil. Part of the Our Faculty's Ongoing Research lecture series.
New Publication:
Exploring how conceptual engineering might be fruitfully applied to seminal issues within analytic theology. Published in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
Updates / News
New Research Grant:
"Launching Experimental Philosophy of Religion"; valued at just under $2.5m; generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
MY LATEST RESEARCH
from the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden
How might the tools and resources of psychology and cognitive science shed light on the problem of evil? In our paper, "Empirical Challenges to the Evidential Problem of Evil", Blake McAllister, Paul Rezkalla, Long Nguyen, and myself consider William Rowe's seminal formulation of the problem.
"Allegory of Fortune and Virtue" by Peter Paul Rubens
New book: Virtue Epistemology and the Analysis of Knowledge (2023). The goal of this book is to motivate and develop a non-reductive account of virtue epistemology, more specifically a non-reductive proper functionalism.