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Home CV Papers What I'm reading Suarez Texts Other links Contact info: sfp26 [at] cornell [dot] edu The Sage School of Philosophy 218 Goldwin Smith Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853

You have chanced upon the webpage of Sydney Penner (in case you forgot to look at the header). Custom apparently has it that one should put some biographical information here. Let me start with the generally academically relevant material and end with the entirely irrelevant.

I am a graduate student in philosophy at Cornell University who is starting to think about writing a dissertation. Meanwhile, I still very much like to indulge my inclination to pursue a wide, rather disparate collection of philosophical interests. Here's a list (not exhaustive!) of some of my philosophical interests: history of philosophy (especially ancient and medieval, i.e., from before the philosophical dark ages ushered in by the Renaissance), ethics and metaethics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics (especially the various realism vs. antirealism debates). Naturally, intersections are welcome. If you really want to know more about what I'm interested in, check out my 'What I'm reading' page.

The current trajectory looks like it will have me working on Francisco Suárez, an unjustly ignored philosopher, for my dissertation. Philosophers are starting to be interested in his work in metaphysics. But he also wrote lots of stuff in ethics, so I would like to work through some of that material. It is a somewhat forbidding prospect, though, since most of Suárez's twenty-six Latin tomes are untranslated. (For those of you currently wondering about my previous remark about the Renaissance, yes, Suárez lived in the sixteenth-century. But he was smart enough to stick to the scholastic tradition and seriously engage with Aquinas, Ockham, and Scotus, among others.)

Turning to the past, before coming to Cornell I did undergraduate work at three schools: Rosedale Bible College, Acadia University, and Yale University, ending up with a B.A. in philosophy and history from Yale. Not only did I get a piece of paper with Latin on it from Yale, I also encountered a young woman there who is now my wife. Erin is now a graduate student in the English department at Cornell. Before embarking on my long undergraduate career, I was busy not going to high school. Instead, I worked long hours on my parents' organic vegetable farm during the summers, and read books (of my own choice, I might note!) during the winter. The fact that I grew up on a farm may have some academic relevance, insofar as it accounts for the lower relative quality of my spring semester papers. April and May ought to be spent planting things, not writing papers.

Of even less relevance, I was born in Spanish Lookout, Belize, though it was still British Honduras at the time of my birth. When I was eight, my family moved to Nova Scotia, where I stayed until I went off to college.

Custom also seems to have it that one should post a picture of oneself on one's webpage. I, however, have no desire to be greeted by a picture of myself every time I work on this page. Our cat is prettier (and she likes books just as much as I do, though perhaps for a different purpose). Besides, we have now reached the most philosophically irrelevant information about me. But, if you must, you can see a picture of me by clicking on the picture of our cat in the header. I promise that I did not try to make myself look presentable for the picture.