About
As current Chair of the Philosophy Department, most of Prof. Kimball’s time is spent facilitating the flourishing of philosophy at the University of Louisville. He oversees and is responsible for all aspects of Departmental life, from budget and scheduling to long-term planning; he coordinates the Department’s cooperation with and contributions to other Arts & Sciences departments, such as Humanities, Women’s & Gender Studies, and Pan-African Studies, and with other University programs and schools, such as Medicine, Law, and Social Work.
In addition, as Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary MA in Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Prof. Kimball contributes to the short- and long-term flourishing of Bioethics at the University of Louisville and to the articulation of the Bioethics Program with its multiple interdisciplinary components. He oversees the Philosophy Department’s contribution to the Program.
The general areas of Prof. Kimball’s interest and expertise have evolved over the years from philosophy of language and philosophy of mind to informal logic and models of rationality to philosophy of emotions, personal identity and the self, and models of human time. As such, he has taught Recent Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Wittgenstein, Epistemology, Advanced Symbolic Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Emotions, and Personal Identity and the Self. In addition, he has regularly taught Modern Philosophy and various introductory logic courses.
Prof. Kimball’s particular research interests include the narrative conception of the self, the interplay between calculative rationality and emotional knowledge, the role of emotions in a fully flourishing life, and the narrative structuring of the time-units of human life and living.
Currently, Prof. Kimball is working specifically on models of time appropriate to explaining temporal dysfunctions—sometimes referred to as the “breakdown of time”—during manic and major depressive episodes and more generally on “the time of human events:” the complex and messy structure of perceived time.