I am a Regular (Tenured) Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. I am also the Founder of Certified AI-Free Skills and Knowledge, a new non-profit grassroots site that identifies and verifies courses where all student work is done in person, offline, and on paper. (To prevent confusion, I am not the person with the same name who goes around calling himself “personal Socrates”). You can find my work on the following platforms:
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Before coming to KPU, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Trent University. I have a PhD in Philosophy from York University (2014), a PhD in Semiotics from the University of Quebec in Montreal (2008)—I was asked by Oxford to do an entry on that for their Bibliographies in Philosophy series—and did my Post-Doc at the University of Helsinki (2014–2015). My two PhDs mean that I am of mixed heritage, being a descendant of Quine, Ryle, and David Lewis on the “analytic” side, with Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer on the “continental” side (see my academic family tree).
He is surely one of the best philosophers in his generation in Canada.
Serge Robert, Dept. of Philosophy, UQAM
Although I conduct my inquiries solely in English, I am also fluent in French and Joual (my native tongue). I was born in a working-class family near Montreal. I now reside on the outskirts of Vancouver, with my loving partner and our six beautiful children, living a low-tech lifestyle of hearty home-cooked meals, logical puzzles and board games at the kitchen table, nightly Québecois storytelling, and weekend farm or museum visits.
My male ancestors were farmers in the summer, lumberjacks in the winter, and draveurs in the spring. My female ancestors were mothers, non-stop. When the cold was at its coldest and the daylight was at its shortest, a dream would tempt those at home and at the logging camp — the dream of flying in a canoe, cutting across vast distances rapidly and without friction. Travel by such chasse-galerie, however, had the highest price of admission: the possible forfeiture of one’s soul. My ancestors coped with hardships and, being mostly illiterate, transmitted what they learned orally, by telling and retelling stories. The message conveyed across time is clear: do not succumb to the temptation of ease. Snowshoeing to one’s goal is harder and takes longer, but the alternative is not worth it. Wherever you are from, I am willing to bet that your culture tells you the same thing. Faced with new shortcuts, I am trying to make the most of this bequeath (click on my great-grandfather for a viable blueprint). The signal has degraded enough.