Amherst Reads Interview

Philosophy is a very dialogic activity.  It's an activity that takes place between individuals. Somebody asking a question, somebody giving a response,  somebody responding to that response and so on down through the ages.  It's a very conversational activity. And in a way askphilosophers.org, and the books that it spawned, is just the first step in the conversation. That is how people's thoughts become deeper and more sophisticated, especially about philosophical matters. They bounce their ideas off of somebody who then comes back with something and it's in the course of that conversation that ideas come to be refined."

Listen to the Interview with Professor Alexander George and Sean Greenberg '94

Sean Greenberg received his A. B. from Amherst, where he majored in French and Philosophy, in 1994; he received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard in 2000.  He taught from 2000-2007 at the Johns Hopkins University before moving to the University of California, Irvine, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy.  His published work has focused on early modern moral psychology, in particular, on early modern conceptions of the passions, the will, and human freedom.  This work is related to a long-term project on early modern conceptions of human freedom.  He is also working on two shorter-term projects: a systematic interpretation of the philosophy of the seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, and--in conjunction with Professor R. C. Sleigh, Jr. of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst--a new translation of Leibniz's Essays on Theodicy: On the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil.