FOCUS ON THE FACULTY

"THE MAN WHO IS SWIMMING AGAINST THE STREAM KNOWS THE STRENGTH OF IT..."
By Monica M. Rasnick
Hugh Wilder
Philosophy

College of Charleston Philosophy Professor Hugh Wilder is dedicated to and actively engaged in improving the quality of education for his students.

Wilder, who has taught more than 30 different subjects, has been teaching at the College since 1981. “I love to teach because I love to learn and I try to instill this love of learning in all of my students,” he says.   Growing up in an academic family and being involved in academic communities inspired Wilder to become a teacher at an early age.  His father was a university librarian and his grandfather, an English professor and dean.  Wilder admired his father’s work and his academic lifestyle and considers him as a major influence of his career choice. Wilder would go to Denison University where he earned his B.A. in Philosophy and his M.A. and Ph.D., also in Philosophy, at the University of Western Ontario (1969 and 1973). Wilder’s research interests are in aesthetics and philosophy of the mind. He is also interested in areas where the two overlap. For example, Wilder expresses the differentiation between imagination and perception and how they are intertwined in our experiences of art. Wilder feels that both are crucial in our everyday lives and that perception shows us how the world is while imagination tells us how the world could be. He says perception reveals the beauty and the problems; without perception, we would not see the problems.  Without imagination, we could not see how to solve the problems and how to make the world a better place.
Wilder states, “Human perception isn't just the passive reception of information.  Perception is active and searching; it is affected by expectation and involves selective focus and attention; perception shapes our thoughts but is also itself shaped by our thoughts."

In a second line of work, Wilder is interested in cognitive ethology, the study of animal minds. Wilder questions such theories as to the reasons that philosophers have so often denied the existence of (non-human) animal minds and the prospects for human understanding of (any) non-human minds.  Wilder became interested in experiments which attempted to teach sign language to chimpanzees and began wondering how unique language use is to human beings.  Bringing science to bear on old philosophical questions seemed like a promising approach.  Cognitive ethology demonstrates that many non-human animals have pretty interesting mental lives. 

Wilder says that he tries to stay current in two areas especially:  language abilities in non-human primates and questions about consciousness and sentience in non-humans.  One question guides his interest in both areas:  How can humans know about the mental lives of non-humans? Wilder is the co-editor of Language in Primates (Springer Verlag, 1983) and the author of articles about the philosophy of language, epistemology, esthetics and philosophy of mind. He has published in The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Metaphilosophy, Social Epistemology, Philosophy and Literature, and elsewhere.Wilder also held a year-long fellowship in Philosophy at Princeton University awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976-77) and has been a participant in several NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes.

Wilder taught at Miami University from 1972 until 1981. He was a member of the 1985 School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University.  More recently, he served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the College of Charleston from 1991 to 2000 and Speaker of the Faculty, 2001-2004.

In Wilder’s spare time, he enjoys swimming for a local Charleston team as a Masters swimmer where he competes internationally.  He currently holds three world records and five national records in backstroke events in the 55-59 age groups. Wilder began swimming competitively as a kid and continued through college.  Wilder and his wife Pana have been married for 37 years and have two grown sons together. 

Three years ago, Wilder began teaching a new course at the College of Charleston on Sports Ethics.  The two issues that concern Wilder the most, which he covers in detail in his class, are the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports (including steroids) and violence in sports (for example, the players' brawl in the Clemson-Carolina football game last season. “Athletes are role models for others in our society, and I am disappointed when high-profile athletes engage in morally questionable behavior," he says. "Also, sports have sometimes been in the forefront of progressive social change, for example, the integration of major league baseball came ahead of integration in public schools, and again I'm disappointed when I see sports tainted by the unethical behavior of a few athletes.” 

Wilder is delighted that his course in sports ethics gives students the opportunity to study such ethical issues and was also able to bring together his life as an athlete and professor.  “I've loved teaching sports ethics-- working with many student-athletes in class and being able to teach about real-life issues in an area I care about," he says. "With all the issues about drugs and violence in sports, it's a timely and important class. I'm glad students at the College now have the opportunity to study sports ethics.”  Although, Wilder taught this class on two separate occasions as a special topics course, he is pleased that the Sports Ethics course has recently been approved as a regular course taught at the College of Charleston.  Wilder’s future goals are to continue to be the very best teacher and colleague that he can be at the College of Charleston.  “I'm much closer to the end of my career than to its beginning, and I want to finish as excited and passionate about teaching as I was when I started,” he says.

For additional information on Dr. Hugh Wilder, please visit::  http://www.cofc.edu/~wilderh/