Greetings! My first name is Charles, but I go by “Ed” (it’s a long story, but I’m willing to tell it to you if you have a few days). I grew up in Indiana, but moved to New York City once I graduated from college. After a lot of activity in the art and theater world, I began studying philosophy at Stony Brook University (New York), and eventually at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität in Tübingen (Germany), and the Philipps-Universität in Marburg (Germany), where I wrote my dissertation, Possibilities for a Non-Ocular Aesthetics in Kant’s "Critique of Judgment" (2002), as a member of the first German-American graduate program in philosophy (the Collegium Philosophiae Transatlanticum).

I began teaching philosophy in New York in 1997, and even taught a graduate course on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics in Manhattan (NYC), before coming to ESU in the fall of 2005—just around the corner from Manhattan, Kansas, as fate would have it. I have published on kitsch and the Kantian sublime, and am presently writing on Kant’s theory of poetry and exploring Herder’s aesthetics.

Here at ESU, I have assisted in the re-birth of the Philosophy Club, which has been sponsoring a “Socrates Café”—a public discussion of philosophical topics—two Thursdays a month since the fall of 2005. We began with the question, “Do good and evil exist?”—and you’re welcome to discuss more philosophical questions at the next meeting! (We’re working to make a webpage appear soon.)

Each semester I teach multiple sections of the introductory philosophy course; in my case, the course focuses on the idea of freedom as self-control over the history of Western philosophy. This semester (fall 2006) I am teaching the ancient Greek philosophy survey course and a course on logic (including less formal, and more “brass-tacks” issues, such as systems of classification, fallacies, and the wider political contexts for the filtering of information).

Last semester, I taught “The Philosophy of Art & Beauty,” beginning with theories of pleasure, censorship, and composition from the ancient Greeks, moving through theories of beauty and the sublime, and finishing with contemporary theorists such as Arthur Danto, who wants to figure out what it is that makes something art in the first place, and whether it actually has anything to do with beauty at all. In the next semester, I’ll be teaching a course on 19th-century philosophy (starring such exciting figures as Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, as well as two 19th-century novels) and a course on society and politics which will start with Rousseau’s Social Contract and end with a contemporary semi-autobiographical novel which reveals how race and gender impact on the life of an individual (Audre Lorde’s Zami).

My office phone number is 620-341-5537 and my e-mail address is cemmer@emporia.edu.