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Patrick Lee Miller
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About Me
With this defended, I worked for a year as the Managing Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, while also busy preparing various publications, and hunting for a tenure-track position in Philosophy. I secured one in Duquesne Philosophy, in Pittsburgh, where I moved in the summer of 2006. Enjoying the catholicism of this department, I have already had the opportunity to teach a wide variety of courses, on various periods and thinkers of ancient philosophy, from Thales to Augustine, but also on the modern thought that most interests me: Nietzsche and Freud, Existentialism and Psychoanalysis. The intersections of philosophy and psychology are of special importance to me because of my ongoing interest in psychoanalysis. In 2006 I earned a four-year "Didactic Academic Associate" degree from the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Carolinas (formerly the UNC / Duke Psychoanalytic Institute). I would like one day to resume clinical training, with the aim of establishing a small practice. By no means do I wish to compromise my research in philosophy, least of all in ancient philosophy. On the contrary, I consider psychoanalysis to be the best modern exponent of the Greeks' quest for self-knowledge, and in that spirit I am working on a long-term project that examines self-knowledge in antiquity, especially its philosophic promise of salvation and its tragic danger of annihilation. As a first stage in that project, I am now finishing my first book, which will be published by Continuum in the summer of 2010: Becoming God: Pure Reason in Ancient Greek Philosophy. My wife, Sarah, earned her Ph.D. from UNC, writing a dissertation on medieval views of the female body as something monstrously excessive. This will appear as a book next year entitled "Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body" (Routledge). She was also hired by Duquesne, as an Assistant Professor of Classics, and is now teaching a wide variety of courses, from languages to mythology to archaeology and history. Amid all this work, she somehow finds time to develop as a chef and a food critic. Devoting equal time to food and paper, then, she makes the results of her twin obsessions available weekly on her food-blog, Food and Paper.
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"Le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant." - Proust
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© 2005 All Materials Copyright P.L. Miller |
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Born in Toronto, I grew up in Thunder Bay and St. Catharines, where I attended Ridley College. To these I owe my love of tundra landscapes and my suspicion of comfort, not to mention my sense that a man without a necktie is naked. My first university was McGill, in Montréal, where I had excellent teachers of philosophy and made still better friends. Moving to Chapel Hill in 1994, I began graduate studies at UNC in Philosophy. Finding English and American philosophy largely silent on the questions that interested me, I began learning Greek and Latin -- first in order to deepen my knowledge of ancient and medieval philosophy, which addressed these questions, but later in order to read more widely in classical literature, which woke me from my philistine slumbers. After finishing the coursework for a Ph.D. in Classics, I returned to UNC's Philosophy department in order to complete my dissertation on purity of thought in Greek philosophy (2005).