In the past year Assistant Philosophy Professor Daniel Breyer has received two major teaching awards.
In June 2012 he was awarded the Kenneth A. and Mary Ann Shaw Fellowship, the most prestigious teaching award granted by the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University. This award came with a $3,500 stipend that Breyer is using to establish a religious studies faculty forum and an education conference at Illinois State.
In December Breyer received the Teaching Initiative Award, the University’s highest award for pre-tenured faculty who have shown considerable promise in teaching early in their academic careers.
In addition, last summer, Breyer participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on “Experimental Philosophy” at the University of Arizona. Selection for NEH Summer Institutes and Seminars is highly competitive.
Experimental philosophy, also known as X-PHI, involves the systematic study and inquiry into the way that people actually think about thought experiments and philosophical questions. Breyer gave a colloquium paper on X-PHI in the department and in the spring semester he is teaching a section of PHI 330 Topics on Moral Philosophy that focuses on Experimental Philosophy.
