Erik Wielenberg | Faculty

Freedom to Explore

Since 1999, Erik Wielenberg has been a fixture of the philosophy department at DePauw University. Not only has he taught a wide variety of courses – many of which relate to his expertise on ethical theory and philosophy of religion – but he has also made his own scholarly contributions to the discipline through an extensive array of books and other published writing.

Yet despite his prominence as a philosopher, Wielenberg refuses to let his curiosity be limited by traditional disciplinary boundaries. Instead, he’s actively searching for opportunities to branch out and explore how philosophy can interact with other areas of study – a practice he sees as an important reclamation of philosophy’s historical roots.

“Recently, I've gotten more and more interested in psychology,” he explains. “If you go back to the old days of moral philosophy, it was very closely connected with psychology. For example, Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher – when he was doing his moral philosophy, he was really doing psychology as part of that. And the thinking is, if you're going to describe what it is to be a good human being, part of that is understanding how the human mind works and what it’s capable of.”

Wielenberg has a keen interest in developing that interdisciplinary understanding, and it’s motivated him to stretch his own intellectual horizons. “It’s gotten me reading lots of psychology and learning a lot about psychology on my own,” he says. For him, that means spending time with psychology journals, reaching out to colleagues in the psychology department, and even attending and presenting papers at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology conferences.

All of it has resulted in a new fascination: psychopathy.

“Most kids go through a dinosaur stage; I'm now in a psychopath stage,” says Wielenberg. It’s not just a hobby though. Instead, it’s an academic focus that has informed his research, infused his writing and inspired a new course for first-year students called The Heart of Darkness, which focuses on evil in the world and how to address it.

“For me, it's pretty exciting to keep learning and to connect philosophy with stuff in other fields. I've had a lot of fun thinking about psychopaths and now teaching about psychopaths.”

Although Wielenberg admits that it can be intimidating to step into new fields of research, he recognizes that it’s an opportunity to model the educational breadth that DePauw is known for.

“This is what the liberal arts is supposed to be,” he argues. “So for me, part of it is asking myself, ‘Can I put the money where my mouth is?’ We're always talking to the students about how you have to make these connections and you can't just have a narrow focus. So can I actually do that? And I think I've had some success so far.”

While some institutions have strict publishing requirements that discourage risk-taking and result in faculty members returning to the same areas of research for much of their careers, Wielenberg enjoys the freedom of an academic environment that empowers exploration.

“I actually have a paper that was published in an English literature journal. It has philosophy in it and it's related to philosophy, but still if I were at a Research 1 university, there's no way I would have said, ‘Let's see if I can publish something in a journal of English literature, which will in no way help me get tenure or keep my job.’ I’ve found that to be very rewarding.”

Whether he’s teaching about moral realism, reading papers about psychopaths or writing about the philosophical implications of a novel, Wielenberg is eager to continue breaking new ground and forging new connections – both in his own work as a philosopher and in the classroom as an educator.

“DePauw has been freeing for me. It's allowed me to have a much better and more interesting research career than I would have had elsewhere.”