Phil Hopkins

Notable Achievements

Professor of Philosophy Phil Hopkins’ chapter, “…As He Says in His Poetical Way: Empedocles and Anaxagoras on the Motive Forces of the Kosmos,” appears in the newly published Companion to Ancient Philosophy, by Northwestern University Press, edited by Sean Kirkland and Eric Sanday. This volume is a major new guide to the field of ancient Greek philosophy from internationally known contributors who are the top experts in their fields. Hopkins’ chapter argues that early thinkers did not view the kosmos as a machine, but rather as motivated by the same psychic forces at work in humans and human societies.

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Phil Hopkins

Professor of Philosophy

Expertise

Research: Critical Media Studies: Ancient Greek philosophy, Teaching: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Literature, Philosophy of Science

Philip Hopkins received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, his MA from St. John’s College in 1990, and his BASS from Stephen F. Austin University in 1984. 

  • Biography

    Philip Hopkins received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, his MA from St. John’s College in 1990, and his BASS from Stephen F. Austin University in 1984. 

  • Research

    I have two areas of primary research, both related around concerns with the ways we talk to each other (our discourse and rhetorical practices), and questions of how we come to know and judge the world.

    One area is the relation between the discourse practices of what I call the “truth-telling media,” i.e. marketing and journalism, and our moral heuristics. This investigation focuses on the growing moralism in mass media, the way that marketing and journalism explicitly build and maintain moral meaning systems and use these to leverage their interests. I explore how this explicit moralism impacts our everyday thinking about ethical and moral issues.

    Another area investigates pre-socratic insights into our most fundamental ways of seeing the world, i.e., such concepts as space, time, language and order or pattern. I am particularly interested in the unusual expositional practices of these earliest thinkers and the relation of what they think about the world to how they choose to talk about those insights.

  • Publications

    “Mass Moralizing,” in Advertising and Reality, Continuum Press (2012)

    “Weaving the Fishbasket: Heraclitus on Riddles and the Relation of Word and World” Epoche 13:2 (2009).

    “To Say What is Most Necessary: Expositional and Philosophical Practice in Thucydides and Plato,” in Philosophy in Dialogue: Plato’s Many Devices, Gary Scott, ed. (Northwestern University Press, Topics in Historical Philosophy Series, John McCumber, ed., 2007).

    “Zeno’s boetheia toi logoi: Thought Problems about Problems for Thought,” Epoche 11:1 (2006).