Bill Vanderburgh
Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1970, my family moved to Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada, when I was 8 years old. I lived there for the next 11 years till the end of high school except for the year I spent, age 16, in West Wyalong, New South Wales, Australia, as a Rotary International exchange student. I played ice hockey from 6 to 16, competed in shot put in high school, dabbled in swimming, canoeing, boating, snowmobiling, cross country skiing, archery, target shooting, paint ball, barbershop and jazz choirs, and theater, but mostly just played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.
I earned a B.A. (Honours) in Philosophy, an, M.A. in Philosophy, and a PhD. in Philosophy of Science, all at the University of Western Ontario, in London, Canada. My dissertation, Dark Matters in Contemporary Astrophysics: A Case Study in Evidential Reasoning and Theory Choice (2001), was (so far as I am aware) the first extended philosophical study of the dark matter problem in astronomy. In between my M.A.. and PhD., I took a three-month, 15000 km, adventure by motorcycle across the northeastern U.S. and then east to west all the way across Canada, camping along the way.
I taught at Concordia University in Montreal for a year while finishing up my dissertation. Then, in 2001-02, I started a tenure track assistant professorship at Wichita State University. Shortly after earning tenure there I began a series of increasingly responsible administrative roles: director of faculty development, director of the honors program, and executive director of faculty development and student success.
That led me to become dean of undergraduate studies at CSU San Bernardino in 2014, a position I held for two years. I’m now back in the classroom as a full professor of Philosophy. The effort-to-income ratio is a heck of a lot better.
In 2019, my book David Hume on Miracles, Evidence, and Probability was published by Rowman and Littlefield’s Lexington imprint.
In between deaning and going back to the classroom, I had a leave for “retooling” and decided to move to San Diego to learn to sail. I loved it so much that I’m still here. When class is in session, I commute to San Bernardino twice a week to teach (or teach online). Since moving to San Diego, besides learning to sail (I now regularly crew for sailboat races) and rekindling my love of photography, I started a blog, CraftBeerInSanDiego.com, which I used to record my visits to all 217 breweries and tasting rooms in San Diego County. (That blog won me the 2018 Beer Blogger of the Year and America’s Biggest Beer Geek awards from BrewDog, the prizes for which were trips to the Great American Beer Festival and to Belgium.) For almost a year I also wrote the craft beer column for Coast News, a community paper covering the northwestern part of the county, but then California changed its freelancer laws. I sold the blog in July 2020 and no longer am involved in beer writing.
Three major projects will occupy me over the next couple of years: Diving back into philosophy of astrophysics and cosmology, writing a science fiction novel, and writing a book for a popular audience on philosophy of religion and the issue of church/state separation.