Joanne B. Waugh
Associate Professor
Associate Department Chair
Director of Graduate Studies

Joanne Waugh joined the USF Department of Philosophy in 1980, after finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California . She works in the history of philosophy, especially Ancient Greek philosophy, aesthetics and art criticism, the philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy. She was also a member of the NEH Summer Seminar: The Genealogy of Postmodernism. Her interest in the history of philosophy goes back to Manhattanville College where she did her undergraduate thesis on Kant. At the start of her doctoral work she learned the extent to which our knowledge of Classical Civilization has changed radically in the past century and her interests shifted to the emergence of philosophy in Ancient Greece. In this she has been very much influenced by Eric Havelock's argument that poetry is attacked in Plato's Republic as the traditional vehicle of Greek paideia, and by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne's analyses of the role of public debate in the rise of the polis. She has written about these topics in the Monist , The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Metaphilosophy , and Who Speaks for Plato. She is currently working on a book that argues Plato's choice to write philosophy as dialogues is the logical outcome of his historical context and his concept of philosophia. Her work in aesthetics and art criticism has appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and Art Criticism . Her interests in feminist philosophy led to her serving as co-editor of Hypatia from 1995-1998, and of Feminists Doing Ethics (2002). An abiding interest in the historiography of philosophy and science was encouraged by her writing with Roger Ariew a chapter on the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science for the upcoming Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science .

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