Christopher Mirus, PhD
Department Chair, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Coordinator, History & Philosophy of Science Concentration
Phone: (972) 265-5842
Email: mirus@udallas.edu
Office: Braniff Graduate Building #336
Office Hours: WR 3:00 - 5:00 p.m. or by Appointment
About
Dr. Mirus arrived at the University of Dallas in 2006. His interests include metaphysics, philosophy of science and nature, and ancient philosophy (especially Aristotle). He loves teaching Philosophy and the Ethical Life to first-semester freshman, seminars on Aristotle or on metaphysics to graduate students, and everything in between.
In and through his teaching, Dr. Mirus is engaged in rethinking the metaphysical legacy of Thomas Aquinas and of St. Thomas's Christian and pagan predecessors. He hopes to bring to this tradition a more adequate focus on the relationality and particularity of all that exists, on concrete human experience, and on metaphor and narrative as forms of understanding.
Dr. Mirus received his doctorate in History and Philosophy of Science, concentrating in philosophy, from the University of Notre Dame in 2004. He did his undergraduate work in theology and philosophy at Christendom College, graduating in 1997. Before arriving in Dallas he taught briefly at Notre Dame, Hunter College, and the University at Albany.
- PhD, University of Notre Dame, 2004
- B.A., Christendom College, 1997
Undergraduate
- PHI 1301 Philosophy and the Ethical Life
- PHI 2323 The Human Person
- PHI 3311 Philosophy of Being
- PHI 3343 From Ancient to Medieval Philosophy
- PHI 3351 Junior Seminar: Aristotle's De anima
- PHI 4333 Philosophy of Science
- PHI 4341 Senior Seminar: Being and Being Given
Graduate
- PHI 6310 Aristotle's Organon
- PHI 6310 Aristotle's De Anima
- PHI 6310 Aristotle's Metaphysics
- PHI 7350 Metaphysics
- PHI 8312 Aristotle's Vision of Nature
- PHI 8315 Aristotle's Categories
- IPS 8321 Plato and Aristotle
Book
Being Is Better than Nonbeing: The Metaphysics of Goodness and Beauty in Aristotle. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022.
Articles
“Relation Is Not a Category: A Sketch of Relation As a Transcendental.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 93 (2019): 189-98
Foreword. Evidence for God from Physics and Philosophy: Extending the Legacy of Monsignor Georges Lemaître and St. Thomas Aquinas, by Robert J. Spitzer, S.J. University of Dallas Aquinas Lectures. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015.
“Excellence as Completion in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics.” The Review of Metaphysics 66 (2013): 663–90.
“Space.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012–13: Ethics and Philosophy, edited by Robert L. Fastiggi, vol. 4, 1448–51. Detroit: Gale, 2013.
“Order and the Determinate: The Good as a Metaphysical Concept in Aristotle.” The Review of Metaphysics 65 (2012): 499–523.
“Aristotle on Beauty and Goodness in Nature.” International Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2012): 79–97.
“The Homogeneous Bodies in Meteorology IV.12.” Ancient Philosophy 26 (2006): 45–64.
“The Metaphysical Roots of Aristotle’s Teleology.” The Review of Metaphysics 57 (2004): 699–724.
“Aristotle’s Agathon.” The Review of Metaphysics 57 (2004): 515–36.
“Homonymy and the Matter of a Living Body.” Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001): 357–73.