Kevin Timpe


Kevin Timpe

Education

PhD, Philosophy, Saint Louis University, 2004

Biography

"I love coffee. Oh yeah, and my kids too. And my wife. And did I mention coffee?”

What it's like to learn in my classroom

One of my main goals in teaching is to help students realize how ideas matter for how we live our lives together. For instance, if we think that it's in some way bad to have a disability, this makes it easier to devalue disabled lives. Once we do that, we're likely as a society to give less opportunities to disabled individuals, which is historically what has happened.

Or, for another example, how we think about the nature of anger shapes our communal practices. Anger clearly can go wrong, becoming the vice of wrath that we see all too often in our culture. But anger also plays a crucial role in motivating us to take action against injustice. What role then does anger have in the moral life? How can we figure out what proper anger is?

I try to address these sorts of issues by bringing together relevant philosophical work with our own life experiences to see their importance and their 'grip' on us.

Academic interests

  • Free will
  • Virtue ethics
  • Philosophy of religion
  • Philosophy of disability
  • Metaphysics

Publications

Books

The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction, with Craig Boyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Routledge Companion to Free Will, edited with Meghan Griffith & Neil Levy. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns, edited with Daniel Speak. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Virtues and Their Vices, edited with Craig Boyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Free Will in Philosophical Theology, Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Free Will and Its Alternatives, 2nd and expanded edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Arguing about Religion. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Recent Publications

"Denying a Unified Concept of Disability," The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy (forthcoming in 2022). 

"Agency and Disability," in The Routledge Handbook of Agency, edited by Luca Ferrero (Routledge, 2022):159-168.

"What are Intended as Systems of Support become Systems of Struggle," Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture (2021).

“Sin in the Christian Tradition,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021): online.

The Virtues: A Very Short Introduction, with Craig Boyd. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“DefiantAfterlife—Disability and Uniting Ourselves to God,” in Voices from the Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology, ed. Michelle Panchuk and Michael Rea, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford University Press, 2020): 206–231.

"The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals, edited with Blake Hereth". New York: Routledge, 2019.

“‘Upright , Whole, and Free’—Eschatological Union with God,” TheoLogica2.2 (2018),1-16: online.

In the news and on the web

Professor Timpe delivered a public lecture at University of York, October, 6, 2017, titled "Structuring Communities for Inclusion rather than Exclusion." You can watch the lecture here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdWPOFx-dUk

Professor Timpe delivered the W. H. Jellema Chair in Christian Philosophy inaugural lecture on Nov. 10, 2016. His lecture, Christian Philosophy and Disability, includes an introduction by Alvin Plantinga. You can watch the lecture here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP7NJkGcVgg

An interview with Prof. Timpe about the Jellema Chair. https://calvin.edu/news/archive/kevin-timpe-begins-as-jellema-chair

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