Philosophy, Sailing, Photography, and Craft Beer
I was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1970. When I was 8, my family moved to Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada (“The Uranium Capital of the World”). 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 read SFF and played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.
I earned a B.A. (Honours) in Philosophy, an M.A. in Philosophy, and a Ph.D. 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 the first extended philosophical study of the dark matter problem in astronomy.
In between my M.A. and Ph.D., I took a three-month, 15000 km motorcycle-camping adventure the northeastern U.S. and then east to west all the way across Canada (every province except for Newfoundland!), 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 founding executive director of the office for faculty development and student success.
That led me to become associate vice president and dean of undergraduate studies at CSU San Bernardino in 2014, a position I held for two years. After a total of ten years in academic administration 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.
I have taught a wide range of courses including critical thinking, symbolic logic, introduction to philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, bioethics, early modern philosophy, rationalism, David Hume, philosophy of science, evidential reasoning, philosophy of cosmology, environmental philosophy, science and the modern world, scientific revolutions, philosophy and science fiction, video games and philosophy, and (my favorite) a one-off, co-taught Honors course on the comet ISON as it was approaching the sun in 2013.
My research specialties are the history and philosophy of science (with a focus on astrophysics and cosmology), early modern philosophy (especially David Hume), and philosophy of religion (atheism, anti-apologetics, and freedom of religion).
In 2019, my book David Hume on Miracles, Evidence, and Probability was published by Rowman and Littlefield’s Lexington imprint.
In 2016, 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 (see my Instagram page), I started a blog 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 weekly 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 am no longer involved in beer writing.
My wife, step-daughter, and I enjoy travel; together and separately, in recent years we have been to Hawaii, England, Belgium, Iceland, and Canada.
Three major projects will occupy me over the next several 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.
Find me on:
Bluesky @billvanderburgh.bsky.social
and at
william.vanderburgh@gmail.com
