Professors Emeriti and Others
James Blachowicz, PhD
Title/s: Professor Emeritus
Email: jblacho@luc.edu
External Webpage: http://orion.it.luc.edu/~jblacho
About
James Blachowicz is professor emeritus of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He joined the Loyola faculty in 1971, having completed his B.S. in philosophy and physics at Loyola University in 1966 and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 1970, where he was a Woodrow Wilson and NDEA Fellow.
His main areas of philosophical research have been: (a) the philosophy of science and the possibility of a logic of discovery (including its classical form in Plato’s Meno Paradox); Hegel's logic; and theories of representation (the analog-digital distinction); (b) non-reductionist theories of physical "emergence," especially the constraint interpretation, and the form this took in Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and contemporary philosophy of science.
Selected Publications
These two areas of research were the subjects, respectively, of his first two books in philosophy:
Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry (1998: SUNY Press).
Essential Difference: Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence (2012: SUNY Press).
His third book The Bilateral Mind as the Mirror of Nature (2022: Palgrave Macmillan) offers a metaphilosophical synthesis of his earlier work – based on the formal categories of holism and analysis that are found in both metaphysical theories of hylomorphism and epistemological theories of human brain laterality.
His papers in philosophy have appeared in Philosophy of Science, The Journal of Philosophy, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Idealistic Studies, The Philosophical Forum, Erkenntnis, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and elsewhere, including The New York Times (see his personal home page for a complete list).
Publications in Other Areas:
He has also provided travel articles to The New York Times on classical Greece (1963) and Roman remains in Algeria & Tunisia (1983) Turkey (1988) and Syria (1990).
Finally, he is the author of two books on early American stonecutters and their work:
From Slate to Marble: Gravestone Carving Traditions in Eastern Massachusetts, 1770-1870, (Vol. I; 480pp), Graver Press, 2006. [website at graverpress.com]
From Slate to Marble: Gravestone Carving Traditions in Eastern Massachusetts, 1750-1850. (Vol. II: 704pp), Graver Press, 2015. [website at graverpress.com]
His last semester of teaching before full retirement was in the Fall of 2012.