Kathleen Wallace

Professor of Philosophy (and Department Chair), Hofstra University. I work in the areas of metaphysics of personal identity, feminism, American philosophy, and ethics, with a particular interest in ethics and sustainability, and responsibility in the context of collective action problems. My book, The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (Routledge, 2019), develops what I call the cumulative network model of the self (CNM). The work builds on feminist theories of the relational self and mereological theories of persons as spatio-temporal objects. On CNM, the self is conceptualized as a network of social, but also biological, physical, cultural, political relations that is also in process (hence, cumulative and temporal). The book then examines how CNM would approach “practical” dimensions of the self, such as those involving autonomy and responsibility.

My interest in philosophy as a way of life grew out of my interest in presenting philosophy as accessible and relevant for students, including philosophy majors, who are not necessarily thinking of graduate school in philosophy, but who develop an interest in philosophy. I taught a course on “Philosophers in Society,” where we explored different roles philosophers (broadly construed) and philosophy play in society (using Justin Smith’s book The Philosopher to structure the course). I have also taught a course on “Happiness and Ways of Life” in which I developed assignments that related philosophical readings to questions about how to live, and that asked the students to consider aspects of their own lives in light of the recommendations for how to live that emerged from the philosophical readings.