Background:

Dr. Shockey received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2004. He joined the faculty of IU South Bend in the fall of 2007, having previously taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Grand Valley State University, and Kalamazoo College.

Teaching Interests:

Dr. Shockey teaches a variety of courses in the history of philosophy, focusing mainly on the modern period (17^th-19^th centuries), and in 20 century European philosophy. He also regularly teaches courses that contribute to the campus-wide General Education program, including introductory-level courses that meet the campus-wide Critical Thinking requirement and an upper-level course on environmental philosophy. The latter also contributes to the Sustainability Studies program, for which Prof. Shockey also offers other courses.

Research Interests:

Dr. Shockey’s research focuses on conceptions of selfhood and subjectivity in the modern Western philosophical tradition, particularly in the work of Rene Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger. He has published a number of articles, most of which deal with Heidegger’s analysis of human existence and the role of that analysis in grounding an account of what it means in general for things to be.

He is currently working on a number of articles on Heidegger, Malebranche, Locke and Kant, as well as a book manuscript on Heidegger: The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Being and Time. Additionally, he co-founded in 2012 (with Clinton Tolley at UC, San Diego, and James Reid, at Metropolitan State University of Denver) the Seminar in Phenomenology and the History of Philosophy (SIPHOP) and organized the first meeting in South Bend in September of 2012 on “Kant and the Founding of Phenomenology.”

New projects going forward include a multi-part project on “philosophy in the food system” that will look at, among other things, the role performing skilled labor plays in living a good life and the complex influences on and norms governing judgments of taste. And recent participation in an NEH Summer Institute on “Self-Knowledge in Eastern and Western Philosophies” has opened some doors for exploring connections between modern Western and classical Indian Buddhist thought.

Various papers can be accessed here:

https://iusb.academia.edu/MatthewShockey

https://philpeople.org/profiles/r-matthew-shockey