Philosophy & Religion

DR. DENNIS PLAISTED has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also holds a J.D. from the University of Southern California. His research interests lie primarily in biomedical ethics, philosophy of religion and early modern philosophy (especially Leibniz). He is presently doing research on so-called appropriation of evil problems in bioethics, problems that involve the question of whether we should use products of past (putatively) evil actions (e.g., data from immoral experiments, tissue from aborted fetuses, embryonic stem cells). In addition to studying this family of problems in its own right, he is currently at work on a book in which he applies the results of this research to the Bible's category of the unclean. Dr. Plaisted is also the author of Leibniz on Purely Extrinsic Denominations (University of Rochester Press, 2002), and was the recipient of the 2002-2003 Leibniz Society Essay Prize for his article, "Leibniz's Argument for Primitive Concepts" (published in Journal of the History of Philosophy (2003) 41: 329-341).