Philosophy Faculty
Michael David Silberstein, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Professor of Science, Society, and Technology
Director and Advisor of the Cognitive Science Minor
silbermd@etown.edu | 717-361-1253 | View CV | http://facultysites.etown.edu/silbermd/
Professor Michael Silberstein is Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Science, Society, and Technology in the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Director of the Cognitive Science Program, and Core Faculty Member in the Neuroscience Program at Elizabethtown College. His primary research interests are foundations of physics, foundations of cognitive science, consciousness studies, and in how these branches of philosophy and science bear on more general questions of reduction, emergence, and explanation. He has published numerous articles in philosophical and scientific journals and books on all these subjects. His most recent books are Beyond the Dynamical Universe: Unifying Block Universe Physics and Time as Experienced (OUP, 2018), Emergence in Context: A treatise in 21st Century Natural Philosophy (OUP, 2022), and Einstein’s Entanglement Bell Inequalities, Relativity, and the Qubit (OUP, 2024).
Gabriel R. Ricci, Ph.D.
Professor of Humanities Emeritus
riccigr@etown.edu | 717-361-1139
Gabriel R. Ricci has taught in the History and Philosophy Departments since 1996, and served as the chair of the History Department from 2004 to 2011. Ricci teaches courses in The Ancient World, the Enlightenment, and Applied Ethics. He developed the College’s first offering in Environmental Ethics. He pursued graduate work at the University of Hamburg and Temple University; where after a post-doctoral teaching fellowship he taught for ten years. His early research interests were in German historicism, Giambattista Vico, Ernst Troeltsch, Martin Heidegger and Continental Philosophy. This concentration led to his translation of Victor Farias’ Heidegger and Nazism (Temple University, 1989); the publication of Time Consciousness, The Philosophical Uses of History (Transaction Publisher, 2002) and The Tempo of Modernity (Transaction Publisher, 2011). He has been the editor of the annual series Religion & Public Life (Transaction Publisher) since 1999. Recent volumes include Politics in Theology, Values and Technology, Morality and the Literary Imagination, Cultural Landscapes, and Faith in Science .He has just been appointed the editor of a new annual series, Culture and Civilization (Transaction Publisher).
Current research interests address the relationship between nature and norm in the ancient world and the intersection of European philosophy and literature in the early twentieth century. His work has appeared in Existentia, An International Journal of Philosophy, History of European Ideas, Humanitas, an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the invigoration of the humanities, and he has published with the Dalkey Archive Press.