Introducing ... David Shoemaker

Another of our newest faculty members, David Shoemaker joined the department in the Fall of 2004. As is often the case with philosophers, his was a somewhat indirect route into the profession. Growing up, he lived in various parts of the country, due to his father's profession as a preacher. He was born in Indianna, then lived in Michigan, Oklahoma, New York and California. His college life began at a small liberal arts college in New York named Houghton College, where he went to study pre-law, majoring in history. One of the courses he took in his first year was an introductory ethics course. Up until then, all of his courses had been pretty easy, but the professor of this course challenged Shoemaker in a way he hadn't been challenged before. After that, Shoemaker changed his major to philosophy, and he graduated in 1985. With a philosophy degree under his belt, the next step was obvious: drive a taxi in Brooklyn. Shoemaker did this for two years, still intending to go to law school at some point in his future. In the meantime, his parents had moved to California, so he moved there in 1987 to establish residency and worked at a law firm as a word processor for two and a half years. This gave him the opportunity to see how miserable the lives of most lawyers actually were, and as a result, he abandoned his plans to go to law school. One other important event that happened while at the law firm was he met his wife-to-be, Marie, there and also his stepdaughters-to-be, Kristin and Ashley.

Without knowing very much about graduate school, Shoemaker enrolled in the graduate program in philosophy at the University of California, Irvine . He went there to do applied ethics, then found he first needed to have a grasp of normative ethics, but in order to do this, he needed to understand the self. Serving as a teaching assistant for a course on personal identity taught by Gregory Kavka got him started on this enterprise, and he began writing his dissertation ("Persons, Selves, and Ethical Theory") under Kavka's supervision. Unfortunately, Kavka died about one year into the dissertation, so Gary Watson took over his role. Shoemaker ended up finishing his dissertation while holding a one year position at Arkansas State University. Then, in an unusual move, he was traded to the University of Memphis for one of their graduate students (ask him for the murky details about this), and stayed there for two years. After that, he held temporary positions at UC Riverside and Cal State Northridge, before coming to Bowling Green.

In his non-philosophical life, he writes and records music, plays guitar, bass, keyboards, and a mean drum machine. He also likes to play poker and will do ventriloquism for a fee.

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