Christopher Voparil

Chris Voparil is associate professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches philosophy and political theory. Widely versed in the history of ideas, his teaching and writing center on ethics and justice with a specialization in the tradition of American pragmatism. He is a leading scholar of the philosophy of Richard Rorty and has been a Fulbright Scholar, Secretary of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, founding President of the Richard Rorty Society, and is currently the co-editor of the journal Contemporary Pragmatism.

He has published widely on the pragmatic tradition and is the author of Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists (Oxford, 2022) and Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). He is co-editor of Pragmatism and Justice (Oxford, 2017) and The Rorty Reader (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), in addition to two volumes of Richard Rorty’s work: What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics (Princeton, 2022) and On Philosophers and Philosophy: Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000 (Cambridge, 2020).

• Ph.D. The New School for Social Research
• M.A. Binghamton University
• B.A. Binghamton University

Voparil's pedagogy and teaching philosophy places a high premium on practices of critical reading, thinking, writing, and discussion centered on sustained engagement with rich text, which demands concentrated interpretation. The path to learning and growth begins in reflective dialogue between student beliefs and experiences and thought-provoking texts. Understanding learning as a process rather than a point in time helps underscore the fact that students bring a host of attitudes, emotions, and expectations to the classroom—life experiences that need to be reconstructed through the process of learning. Because such reconstruction is not only cognitive but deeply affective, care must be taken to support not only intellectual growth but emotional as well. It demands creating a classroom milieu that fosters engagement with difference, where individual and social habits can be reconstructed through dialogue. It prioritizes talking with rather than at or about each other, to shift the focus to relationship building, talking about assets rather than deficits, and developing solutions over time rather than quick fixes.

• Social and Political Philosophy
• Ethics
• American Philosophy
• Dialogues of Belief and Reason
• Dialogues of Justice and Civic Life

• Union Institute & University Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2016
• Herbert L. and Dr. Beth I. Alswanger Gopman Research Fund Award, 2015
• Union Institute & University Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship, 2013
• Fulbright Scholar, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, 2012