The Jellema Room: Calvin Philosophy Department

05/01/2025

This past week has been one of much deserved recognition for Professor Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung. On Friday, April 25, she was recognized by Calvin University with the Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching. This is the highest teaching award given by the University. And then on April 30, Professor DeYoung was surprised during the philosophy department's year end Food for Thought with the Professor of the Year award, which is voted on by the graduating senior class. This is thought to be the first time that a professor has ever been given both of these honors in the same year. And she certainly deserves both of them. You can read the articles below about each of the awards.

09/25/2024

Join the Calvin Philosophy department for our annual William H. Jellema Lecture in Christian Scholarship, Monday, October 7, 7:30pm, in the Calvin Chapel sanctuary.
Dr. Meghan Sullivan, University of Notre Dame, will be our lecturer this year. Her lecture “Loving Strangers,” will offer a fresh look at Good Samaritans and the moral concepts that guide them. Are Good Samaritans really that good? And do the rest of us have any reason to love complete strangers? How would this change our relationships and our politics?
Dr. Sullivan is the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. She serves as Director of the University-wide Ethics Initiative and is the founding director of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, which launched in the summer of 2024.

For more lecture information: https://calvin.edu/events/jellema-lecture-1728343800

04/01/2024

Join the Calvin Philosophy department for a lecture by Dr. Aaron Simmons.
"Finding Meaning in Life By Going Camping With Kierkegaard"
Monday, April 8, 4:00pm
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

In this talk, Aaron Simmons will take us on a trip to the mountains to reflect on the meaning of life. In a world too often defined by a quest for “success” that leaves us empty, alone, and anxious, Simmons seeks “faithfulness" outdoors with thinkers and artists from Aristotle to Kierkegaard, Sartre to Anne Lamott, and Kendrick Lamar to Donovan Woods. Simmons invites us to rethink what it means to make choices, take risks, be alone and silent while cultivating friendships, and to find our calling by facing our vulnerability. In the end, Simmons shows that faithfulness is more than a religious concept. It is about living a life of risk with direction.
More info: https://calvin.edu/calendar/event.html?id=8fd3da984ff83a6c6bdb839eb3569f13

02/19/2024

Rachel Gabor is a senior studying Philosophy and Film Production. Rachel chose philosophy as major because she had no other choice. She says, "I am not capable of un-asking the questions that have haunted me my entire life." This semester she is studying in Los Angeles with a film internship, so her post-grad plans depend on how the internship goes. She will either be staying in LA or going home to work in the film industry.

Advice from Rachel:
"My advice to current and incoming students is to make friends in your classes. Some of the best conversations and understandings have come from after class conversations. "

02/12/2024

Joshua studied Philosophy and Psychology (neuroscience concentration).
Reading Alvin Plantinga's Reason and Belief in God impressed him with what Christian philosophy could be that he wanted to do it himself. He currently taking a gap year to decide whether to continue on in higher education. Additionally, he and his wife are in the process of establishing a transitional housing program out of their home for single mothers and their children in need. The hope is to get the ministry running smoothly during the gap year.

Advice from Joshua:
"READ YOUR BIBLE. The process of getting a higher education will expose you to a lot of ideas on what the good life is and how to live it that go against what is taught in the Bible. In the midst of your education, you need to go to the Bible to find what it says about how you should be living your life and ponder how to best spend the few days on earth God has given to you. The good life is the one lived in relationship with God by faith in Jesus Christ and consists, largely, in radical obedience to all that Jesus commanded."
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02/05/2024

Tristan Viegas is a senior studying Philosophy, Finance and Economics (minor). For Tristan, philosophy was a means to ask and answer deep questions about life, faith, and the wider world around him. "Philosophy is one of the best disciplines to learn how to read and understand life-changing texts, think critically, and become a strong argumentative writer (which is a key aspect of equity research)." After graduation, he is planning to do a Master's in finance programs and later going for equity research.

Advice from Tristan:
"Be involved with philosophy in some manner. It may not be a double major or a minor, but you should absolutely take at least one course from Calvin's world-class philosophy department. Many employers love philosophers. Whether you are a biology, computer science, english, engineering or finance major, philosophy will strengthen your skills in your respective field. Philosophy is not so much a subject about something as it is a tool, and a way to think, about all things. Everyone can do philosophy. Everyone can benefit from philosophy."

01/29/2024

2024 Senior spotlight:
Raegan Visker is a senior studying Philosophy and International Relations. She chose a philosophy major because the study of philosophy as a way of life here at Calvin has been irreplaceable to her formation as a person and a Christian. After graduation she is planning to attend Michigan State University College of Law on a full tuition scholarship to pursue a JD. Eventually she hopes to practice criminal or civil law.

Advice from Raegan:
"My advice to current or incoming students would be to intentionally explore what you are learning in classes outside of the classroom as well through conversations with friends and family and through reflection. "

09/25/2023

Dr. Andrew Chignell will deliver the 2023 William H. Jellema Lecture
Monday, October 9, 7:30pm, Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Lecture Abstract:

Those of us who relish certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe that it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our private, individual choices that we are unable to resist. My goals here are to explore the challenges that this sort of futility poses to our moral resolve in a variety of contexts, and to argue for an approach that is non-consequentialist at bottom -- but still sensitive to the role that consequences play in our moral psychology. Along the way I examine a number of different accounts of what it means to “make a difference” before articulating my own.

About the Lecturer:

Andrew Chignell is Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. A graduate of Wheaton College and Yale University, he previously taught in the Philosophy departments at University of Pennsylvania and Cornell. His work focuses on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and related early modern figures, philosophy of religion, the ethics of belief, and the moral psychology of hope and despair. From 2020-2023 he served as President of the North American Kant Society. Together with Matthew Halteman and Terence Cuneo, he is the co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner (2016). His massive open online course on “Food Ethics” will be available in fall 2023 on Coursera.org.
https://calvin.edu/calendar/event.html?id=e42a847457e9ad3907689d3539f4244e

06/26/2023

Calvin Philosophy professor Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung is leading a seminar "Does Your Character Preach?" for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship this week. Tuesday night she will be giving a lecture that is free and open to the public - "Christian Character Formation in a Culture of Anger."

For more lecture information and livestream link, visit https://worship.calvin.edu/news-events/events/christian-character-formation-in-a-culture-of-anger/?utm_source=CICW+Mailing+Lists&utm_campaign=2ffaccfa36-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_06_22_05_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-2ffaccfa36-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

03/16/2023

"Mental Disorder, Meaning-Making and Identity"
Guest lecture by Dr. Kate Finley, Hope College
March 29, 3:30pm, Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Lecture Abstract: Mental disorders (e.g. bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) often cause profound suffering - disrupting people's abilities to trust their own perceptions, beliefs, and emotions. This psychological suffering can destroy someone’s sense of identity and meaning; however, for others, it can be a profound source of meaning and integral part of identity (e.g. the Hearing Voices and Mad Pride movements). How should we make sense of these two ‘sides’? Furthermore, how should we understand the role of Christian beliefs, experiences, and communities in navigating these questions - especially as many Christian churches either ‘over-spiritualize’ or ‘under-spiritualize’ mental disorder? I will address these questions by drawing on resources from philosophy, psychology, and theology - as well as my interviews with many who have experienced a severe mental disorder and its interactions with their identity (especially their religious identity).

About the Lecturer: Dr. Kate Finley works on topics in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, including perception, embodiment and mental disorder. She also addresses topics in philosophy of religion including religious experience, disability and the problem of evil. She teaches courses on these topics including Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Disorders and Disabilities, as well as Applied Ethics, and Hope’s First Year Seminar and Cultural Heritage courses.

Lecture Abstract: Mental disorders (e.g. bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) often cause profound suffering - disrupting people's abilities to trust their own perceptions, beliefs, and emotions. This psychological suffering can destroy someone’s sense of identity and meaning; however, for others, it ...

02/02/2023

11/09/2022

Calvin Philosophy alum Emmalon Davis returns to Calvin next week to guest lecture for the department.
Thursday, Nov. 17
3:30pm
Hiemenga Hall 336
Lecture Abstract: In her brief public political career (from 1831-1833), abolitionist Maria Stewart advanced a multi-genre manifesto advocating for the complete liberation of African descendants in America. In Stewart’s work, however, one can trace two seemingly opposed philosophical trajectories. On one hand, Stewart espouses an insurrectionist approach rooted in a kind of militarism and violence. On the other, she employs a pacifist logic of moral persuasion that relies on appeals to the rationality and sympathy of others. In this project, I attend to the question of how to read Stewart without obscuring or disregarding apparent contradictions in her politics. My query is motivated by an interest in how attention to Stewart’s thought can inform contemporary approaches to paradoxes arising at the intersections of public political theorizing, private acts of resistance, and collective organizing.
About Dr. Davis: Emmalon Davis is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She specializes in ethics, social and political philosophy, and epistemology. Much of Davis’s work explores the social processes through which knowledge is collectively developed and disseminated within and across communities. In particular, she looks at how race and gender oppression exert a distorting influence over these processes. Davis’s work has appeared in academic journals such as Hypatia, Ethics, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. She is currently working on a project exploring the political philosophy of black feminist abolitionist Maria Stewart. This research is supported by fellowships from the ACLS and from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, where she is in residence for the academic year. Davis received her Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2017, and her BA from Calvin College in 2010. Before coming to Michigan in 2019, she was an assistant professor at The New School for Social Research.

In her brief public political career (from 1831-1833), abolitionist Maria Stewart advanced a multi-genre manifesto advocating for the complete liberation of African descendants in America. In Stewart’s work, however, one can trace two seemingly opposed philosophical trajectories. On one hand, Stew...