John W. Powell, Philosophy, Humboldt State Univ.--Website Summary

             These paragraphs, about three screens worth, summarize this website. Main topics are teaching, scholarly work, service, current projects, plus an abbreviated personal history.

I've been teaching at Humboldt since fall of 1993. I work hard at my teaching. Two archives make up a large part of this website, providing links to many syllabi in two categories. First are courses which are part of the HSU catalog. Most of those are Philosophy Department offerings, in General Education or for the major, with a few exceptions. I have lots of favorites, will mention only three: (1) the Intro course; (2) the first course in the history of Western philosophy sequence on the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle; and (3) the broad synthesis Jim Derden calls "the impossible everything course," Perspectives on Science, Social Sciences, and Humanities. In a second group are courses that change topics--seminars or one-credit overload reading groups. In recent years these have generally been about Wittgenstein or philosophical methods. The archives also show tracks of teaching literature, Native American philosophy, and writing.

I've generally had from 70 to 140 students in four classroom each semester, with the mean somewhere near 100, two semesters per year, approaching a total then over twenty years of 4000 students, each of whom in a three-credit course is expected to write 20 graded pages of philosophical work. I write three or four pages of comments with my grades for each student. You can run the numbers while I hold my head. I have in the last three years been keeping all my comments together in a file for each course, and require students in most courses to post their essays where the rest of the class can read them.

That teaching overlaps with my scholarly work. I am on the program committee (was chair for three years) of the North American Wittgenstein Society. Wittgenstein societies are becoming an international scene. We (NAWS) have had several international presenters, and I've presented at conferences in England, Germany, and Finland. My Ph.D. dissertation, Language as Signs, questions the consensus view of language and points to discrepancies between how philosophers see language and how everyone else sees language. The implication is that the philosopical account is in need of justification, is perhaps problematic, and may even be, by and large, a hoax. I've written on what education is for and on mistakes in accountability initiatives and outcomes assessment in higher education. I've also written on (and presented at Navajo Studies Conferences) Navajo thinking as offering corrections to some assumptions in dominant Western-Civ type philosophy. Although I'm easily distracted, I think of myself as generally working on questions about philosophical methods. For the last two years I have been working on subversion as a key impulse in philosophy and on problems with how pacifism and just war theory both miss the main issues regarding war. I suggest that philosophy should not be regarded as a separate academic discipline or speciality, and that thinking of philosophy as a science or as analogous to the sciences is disastrous to understanding it.

I've been active in service to the University. I have served on a wide variety of committees and on the Academic Senate, the Senate Executive Committee, the University Budget Committee, a task force to rewrite the governance structure documents (constitution and bylaws), and have for a year now been freed from my two two-year terms as General Faculty President. My main accomplishment in service may be my futile participation over four years in the faculty's organizing its discontents with the university's president and its passing in May of 2009 a motion of No Confidence (which included, for those who don't get what a No Confidence motion means, a statement that the President should step down within two months). I also have been a voice for a threatened vision of the university as a place for teaching ambitious preparation for working on urgent global and environmental problems, a vision which requires fanatical dedication to excellence in teaching. In my post as GF President, I came to see clearly that the University's faculty members are remarkable resources, working under preposterously onerous conditions.

I am in the middle of a project converting and posting work I have done in the form of e-books.

This website is centered on my professional work. There's not much focus on memoir, photos, friends, poetry, children, comedy, intellectual influences, though some shows up by-the-way. Here's a sketch with suppressed stories behind almost every clause.
              I was born in Missouri, oldest of six children, went to the University of Missouri for a bachelor's with an English major (with work in math, physical sciences, and classics) and started graduate school in English while waiting for the draft. I was a conscientious objector medic in the Army in San Antonio and Beaupyong, So. Korea for two years until mid 1971.
              I began part time graduate school at the University of Oregon in Eugene while working full time in a lumber mill. I worked toward an interdisciplinary Master's degree in literature, psychology, and philosophy, then switched to philosophy when I was offered a fellowship. The department then was dominated by an astounding vanguard collection of ordinary language philosophers (sort of Wittgensteinian, if you need that slightly misleading peg) including Frank Ebersole, Henry Alexander, Don Levi, Will Davie, Bob Herbert, and still-lingering long shadows of John Cook and John Wisdom. We also had a continuing series of distinguished and to-be-distinguished visitors and a smart and funny community of graduate students. Some of those continue to meet and to argue in Eugene. There have been attempts to achieve elsewhere what we had at Oregon (at Chapel Hill, Wales at Swansea, Chicago, Abo Akademi, East Anglia), with some success. That the UO let the program dissipate with retirements still leaves me bitter.
              Graduate school while working in a mill and achieving some understanding of the fomenting Copernican revolution in philosophy happening around me was all very slow going. My daughter Rachel was born in 1972. My brother Bill and my teacher Don Levi have remained steadfast friends. I did some teaching of literature, remedial writing, study skills, critical thinking, and logic at the Oregon State Correctional Institution (for Chemeketa Community College), at Oregon State University, and at the University of Oregon's Educational Opportunity Program, all while still working at the mill. I took the M.A. in 1984, quit the mill to become a senior instructor and Services Coordinator at EOP (with a 9K cut in pay to become an academic), and finished my dissertation in 1988. I came to Humboldt on a leave of absence in 1993, was invited to stay.
             I'm married to a reader, intellectual, critic, physicist, photographer (this is one person) and we have two elementary school kids who are hard to keep in Legos and books and craft materials. Naomi's big family and my daughter and grandson all live in the Seattle area and we are glad to visit. I'm revising this sitting in Naomi's parents' house in Edmonds, WA, looking every once in a while to my right out at Puget Sound and the snow-covered peaks of the Olympic Peninsula. The four of us, plus a smattering of cats, live in a hundred-and-ten-year-old farmhouse on a couple of acres in Blue Lake, California. I often still think of myself as an Oregonian.
             
As I said, I'm leaving out a lot. Jehovah's Witness family, writing poetry, near misses at catastrophe, defeats, victories, friends, travel, old cars, and so on and so forth. Some of it is more vital than some of what's here, as you might expect, especially if you are not a philosopher.              
             
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