Phil Hopkins

Notable Achievements

Lurlyn and Durwood Fleming Professor of Philosophy Phil Hopkins has completed a second 10-month contract with the Austin Police Department (APD), this time to develop guidelines and formal procedures for selecting and reviewing video training material for the Cadet Academy that focus on recognizing and addressing the ways video material can have unintended consequences and harms and may reinforce rather than disrupt larger cultural narratives and stereotypes. Hopkins has written and submitted a final report to APD and the Austin City Council. He remains under contract for the remainder of this year on the larger curriculum review committee whose task is to review and develop improved training curricula and content across the several training regimes for APD. This work was recently featured in a 60 Minutesepisode that noted its innovative (and largely unprecedented) approach but not the many and various difficulties it faces among entrenched institutional histories and competing political agendas. 

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Phil Hopkins

Professor of Philosophy

Expertise

Research: Critical Theory (Culture, Race, Police), Phenomenology of Body, Process Ontology     Teaching: Embodied Self, Identity

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.  One area explores how process ontology (world as event) impacts our thinking about pretty much everything, but particularly identity, including racialized and gendered identities.

    Related to the first, but distinct, is critical police theory, including a phenomenology of embodied policing, and critical theory of policing systems and structures. 

  • Publications

    “…As He Says in His Poetical Way: Empedocles and Anaxagoras on the Motive Forces of the Kosmos,” in Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Northwestern University Press (2018)

    Mass Moralizing: Marketing and Moral Storytelling, Lexington Press (2015)

    “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).