Faculty

D.C. Schindler

Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology
Ph.D. Program Advisor
DC Schindler portrait

RESEARCH AREAS

• Metaphysics
• Philosophical Anthropology
• Political Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophical Theology

D.C. Schindler

Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology
Ph.D. Program Advisor

Education

Ph.D., Philosophy, The Catholic University of America
M.A., Philosophy, The Catholic University of America
M.T.S., Pontifical John Paul II Institute, Washington, D.C.
B.A., Program of Liberal Studies, The University of Notre Dame

Bio

Dr. Schindler’s work is concerned above all with shedding light on contemporary cultural challenges and philosophical questions by drawing on the resources of the classical Christian tradition.  His principal thematic focus is metaphysics and philosophical anthropology, but he also works in political philosophy, phenomenology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, and philosophical theology.  His main historical areas are ancient Greek philosophy (especially Plato and Neoplatonism), German philosophy (especially Hegel and Heidegger), and Catholic philosophy (especially Aquinas and 20th Century Thomism).

Dr. Schindler studied the Great Books as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, received a Master’s degree in theology at the John Paul II Institute, and then completed his education with a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in philosophy at The Catholic University of America.  After teaching for twelve years at Villanova University, first as a teaching fellow in philosophy and then as a founding member of the Humanities Department, Dr. Schindler returned to Washington, DC to teach philosophy courses at the Institute.  He has published more than a dozen books—including two volumes of a planned trilogy on the nature of freedom with the University of Notre Dame Press and a Robert Spaemann Reader with Oxford University Press—and more than 70 articles and book chapters, and his work has been translated into six languages.  He is an editor of the English-language edition of Communio: International Catholic Review, and a board member of The Review of Metaphysics and New Polity: A Journal of Post-Liberal Thought; he is a translator of books and articles from French and German; he is a Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at CUA and served on the Executive Council of the American Catholic Philosophical Association; and he has been invited to deliver named annual lectures in a variety of venues, including the Thomas Aquinas Lecture at four universities and colleges, the Bitar Memorial Lecture series at Geneva College, the John Paul II Lecture at the University of Dallas, the Lorenzo Albacete Lecture in New York City, and the Areopagus Lecture at Mars Hill Audio Journal in Charlottesville, VA.

Dr. Schindler lives in Hyattsville, MD, with his wife, Jeanne, and three children.

Courses

JPI 553/763

Being as Gift: Philosophical Foundations

This course elucidates the constitutive elements of a metaphysics of love necessary to undergird John Paul II’s nuptial anthropology. John […]

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JPI 569/866

Dominion and Technē

This course is essentially an exploration of the philosophical and theological meaning of work. In order to illuminate the meaning […]

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JPI 628/854

Philosophical Anthropology

The philosophical study of human nature is as old as philosophy itself; nevertheless, a distinct field known as “philosophical anthropology” […]

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JPI 982a

Christian Metaphysics: A Reading of Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus

Ferdinand Ulrich’s philosophy is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is one of the most profound meditative inquiries into the […]

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JPI 982b

Christian Metaphysics: Divine and Human Freedom

This course will explore what it means to say that God is free and what human freedom means in relation […]

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JPI 982c

Christian Metaphysics: Ferdinand Ulrich & Twentieth-Century Thomism

This course will explore the work of the speculative Thomist Ferdinand Ulrich within the context of the “rediscovery of being” […]

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JPI 987a

Phenomenology: The Roots of Catholic Phenomenology  

Phenomenology has been one of the main philosophical movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and has occupied the attention […]

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JPI 988a

Philosophical Anthropology: Body, Soul, Spirit

John Paul II has called the Christian vision of the world simultaneously anthropocentric (in the positive sense!) and theocentric. One […]

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JPI 988b

Philosophical Anthropology: God and the Political Order

What role does God play in the political order? This course will reflect on the “place” of God in the […]

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JPI 988c

Philosophical Anthropology: Perception and Imagination

The bodily senses, and the specifically human way of thinking that is deeply intertwined with them, have a significance in […]

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Books


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