Claremont Graduate University

Graduate Student, School of Politics and Economic

Thesis Title: 'To Secure the Public Good and Private Rights': the Common Good in the Rhetoric of Ratification

About

Devoted to strengthening, renewing and re-forming educational institutions and programs dedicated to the humanities and liberal arts education, I am currently completing my dissertation. "To Secure the Public Good and Private Rights: the Public Good in the Rhetoric of Ratification" is an analysis of the understanding of the purpose of government revealed by both sides in the published debates over the adoption of the United States Constitution in 1787-1788.

While completing coursework at Claremont Graduate University I taught two “great books” style seminars on Herodotus and the Lincoln-Douglas Debates for the Humanities Program and a Freshman Writing Seminar introducing Logic and Rhetoric for the English Department at nearby Azusa Pacific University.

I was tempted to write my dissertation critiquing Harry Jaffa's first book, which was influenced heavily by Leo Strauss, entitled "Thomism and Aristotelianism."  Much of the thrust of my academic work in the realm of political philosophy revolves around related topics.


I have been professionally involved in political and educational research throughout my time in graduate school, helping clients such as the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the James Madison Program at Princeton University, the American Institute for History Education, and many others engaged in teaching history, civics, and American political thought better achieve their goals. I’ve worked closely with history and political science professors nationwide to create and implement ways of determining whether or not students and K-12 teachers have mastered history, civics, and government content.

At the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College I was involved in research and analysis of state and local government both nationally and in California. This inspired several efforts in political consulting to harness technology in ways that served practical human political needs.

My senior thesis explored the notion of the beautiful in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in relation to art and learning. The curriculum at Thomas Aquinas College, from which I graduated in '01, is a four-year interdisciplinary course of study of the original writings of the great philosophers, historians, mathematicians, poets, scientists, and theologians of the West.

I have a strong interest in centers, institutes, programs, departments and institutions of higher education attempting to creatively maintain and create the study of liberal arts in ways that make intellectual and prudential sense for today's students and the institutions which ought to serve them.  The very idea of the university as understood today is unclear and needs to be radically questioned.  In many respects our educational system is a sort of gigantic, fractured Frankenstein of monstrous proportions that cannot decide what its purpose is. 

Interests include: the relation between understandings of human nature and nature-in-general and the corresponding principles and ends of various political philosophies; the philosophic underpinnings of democracy and the intellectual roots of contemporary political positions, policies and discourse; natural rights and natural law; the compatibility or lack thereof between the political philosophy and ethics of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas; the compatibility or lack thereof between ancient, medieval, and early modern political philosophy; the relation of church and state; the underlying political philosophy of the American regime and its changes and permutations over time.

Outside of political philosophy and American government, interests include the ancient and medieval idea of the One and the Many as well as Beauty and art (especially in Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas); the role of understandings of Beauty in religion; natural philosophy and human understandings of nature; metaphysics.

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