Dr. Ian M. Church
I am an associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College, and I am the director of the (newly minted!) Arete Research Center for Philosophy, Science, and Society. My areas of specialization are epistemology and the philosophy of psychology. My current research includes work on intellectual virtues, the Gettier Problem, epistemic luck, disagreement, heuristics and biases, non-reductive models of knowledge, the social situatedness of reasoning, experimental philosophy, and religious epistemology.
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, literature, ichthyology, and academic ancestry.
My wife and I have been married for 17 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 Radio Interview:
On Radio Free Hillsdale, where I talk about some of my research on experimental philosophy of religion and the new project.
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, "Evil Intuitions?", Rebecca Carlson, Justin Barrett, and myself sketch the theoretical framework for experimental philosophy of religion.
"Allegory of Fortune and Virtue" by Peter Paul Rubens
New forthcoming book: Virtue Epistemology and the Analysis of Knowledge (Bloomsbury). The goal of this book is to motivate and develop a non-reductive account of virtue epistemology, more specifically a non-reductive proper functionalism.