John Shook

Department of History and Government

Dr. John R. Shook received his PhD in Philosophy at the University at Buffalo SUNY and has taught at Oklahoma State University and the University at Buffalo before coming to Bowie State University as a Lecturer in Philosophy. He has also been an Affiliate Faculty of the PhD program at Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, Ohio; a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia; and an Associate Fellow at the Center for Neurotechnology Studies in the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Virginia.

Dr. Shook’s primary research areas are American intellectual history, philosophical naturalism, political philosophy, humanist ethics and cosmopolitanism, and philosophy of religion. He has authored and edited more than a dozen books and dozens of articles in academic journals. Among his books are Dewey’s Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (authored, 2000), Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism (edited, 2003), Blackwell Companion to Pragmatism (co-edited, 2005), The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 4 vols. (edited, 2005), The Future of Naturalism (co-edited, 2009), John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit (co-authored, Fordham 2010), The Essential William James (edited, 2011), and The Dictionary of Early American Philosophers, 2 vols. (edited, 2012).