Faculty
Jan-Erik Jones
Professor of Philosophy; Humanities Division Chair; Philosophy Program Coordinator
“Philosophy is the rational search for fundamental truths and asks the foundational questions about the nature of knowledge, reality, and values. Some of the specific topics of philosophical inquiry concern the nature of truth, rationality, science, language, ontology, causation, morality, justice, beauty, art, identity, space, time, law, minds, and personhood. Philosophy establishes the foundations for every other discipline and is the most important subject one could study in college. In my classes, we carefully examine the key arguments and influential thinkers in the core subject areas of philosophy.”
Education
- Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of California at Irvine, 2002
- M.A. in Philosophy, Arizona State University, 1997
- B.A. in Philosophy, Brigham Young University, 1995
Courses
- Core: Reason and the Self, Introduction to Logic
- Philosophy Major: Epistemology, Metaphysics, The Rationalists, The Empiricists, Philosophy of Religion
- Travel Study: past trips to England, Ireland, and Washington D.C.
Teaching Positions & Professional Experience
- Joined the Southern Virginia University faculty in 2002
Scholarship & Creative Work
- Philosophical interests lie primarily in the core areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, philosophy of language, and epistemology
- articlePublished works on John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz and Robert Boyle
- Editor of pdfThe Bloomsbury Companion to Robert Boyle
- Scholarly articles, chapters, and book reviews have appeared in Journal of the History of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, HOPOS, Journal of Philosophical Research, Southwest Philosophy Review, Metascience, bookThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, The Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, Routledge’s The Lockean Mind, and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Awards, Leadership & Service
- Philosophy Program Coordinator, Southern Virginia University, 2017–present
- Invited to National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars, 2003, 2010