PROFESSOR
Department of Philosophy
St. John Hall, Room B30-9
Queens Campus
St. John’s University
8000 Utopia Parkway
Queens, NY 11439
Phone: (718) 990-5289
Fax: (718) 990-1907
sullivad@stjohns.edu
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
- Ph.D., Philosophy, Fordham University, 1972
- M.A., Philosophy, Fordham University, 1968
- B.A., Philosophy, St. John’s University, 1967
AREAS OF INTEREST
- Ethics
- Philosophy of mind
- Philosophy of language
- Philosophy of religion
PROFILE
Denis Sullivan has been a member of the Philosophy Department since
1969. During that time, Dr. Sullivan has also served for one
semester as a visiting professor at Leuven University in Belgium
and for four semesters as the director of the St. John’s foreign
studies program in Budapest Hungary. He has been a member of
the C. S. Peirce Society, the American Philosophical Association,
and the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
After doing some initial work on the philosophy of C. S. Peirce,
Dr. Sullivan went on to use the resources provided by the analytic
tradition to deal with issues especially in ethics and the
philosophy of mind. In ethics, his main interest has been in
trying to argue that, contrary to what is assumed among many
contemporary philosophers, affirmative morals propositions can be
true in the same robust sense in which scientific propositions can
be true. In the philosophy of mind, his interest has been in
exploring the relationship between scientific accounts of human
behavior and the traditional belief that human beings are free.