Michael O’Rourke
Michael O’Rourke, Professor of Philosophy, examines the process of crossdisciplinary research, specifically communication and integration, and the nature of linguistic communication among intelligent agents.
O’Rourke is Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, an NSF-sponsored research initiative that investigates philosophical approaches to facilitating interdisciplinary research http://tdi.msu.edu/, and Executive Director of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Center, a service center based in the Department of Philosophy at MSU that provides capacity building services to crossdisciplinary research teams around the world. He has been a principal investigator, co-principal investigator, or collaborator on projects funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Naval Research, USDA-NIFA, and NASA. He co-founded and served as co-director of the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, an interdisciplinary conference on philosophical themes, and he co-edited the series, Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, published by MIT Press. He has published extensively on topics in the philosophy of communication, social epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of environmental science, crossdisciplinary education, research ethics, team science, interdisciplinary theory and practice, and robotic agent design. O’Rourke teaches undergraduate courses in critical thinking, formal logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology, and graduate courses in philosophy of communication and interdisciplinary epistemology.
Before coming to MSU, O’Rourke was a faculty member in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Idaho for 16 years, teaching philosophy, environmental science, and neuroscience. He taught at Kansas State University from 1994 to 1996 and lectured at Stanford University in 1993 and 1994. O’Rourke received his doctorate in philosophy in 1995 and his master’s degree in philosophy in 1991 from Stanford University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Kansas in 1987.
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Professor:
Dept. of Philosophy
Faculty:
AgBioResearch
Affiliate:
ESPP, GenCen
Michigan State University
524 S. Kedzie Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824-1032
517-432-0751
orourk51@msu.edu