Biography
Jonathan Beever earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy from Purdue University where he later stayed as a National Science Foundation funded postdoctoral researcher in biomedical engineering ethics. After completing another postdoctoral appointment at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute, Dr. Beever became an Assistant Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture and was appointed to the Philosophy andTexts and Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida.
In 2019, Dr. Beever took on an additional role at the university as a Founding Director of the UCF Center for Ethics. Here, the aim is to cultivate an institutional culture of ethical literacy with a unified and ongoing conversation about ethics and a habit of practical application to research, teaching, and partnerships. The role has afforded him the privilege to work with students in a variety of different ways, such as the Ethics Ambassadors Network. The Network allows student volunteers to help organize events, collaborate in research projects, and lead workshops and trainings.
Dr. Beever’s research in applied ethics is important because its goal is to help the community reimagine their relationships to and in the natural world. One problem at the forefront of his work is the rate and scope of anthropogenic climate change. “Despite all the science and data about how dangerous anthropogenic climate change is and will continue to be, and the horrible effects it has on life around is, nothing much is changing,” he says. This focus on ecological ethics is all in the service of helping others think in new ways about our network of relationships, how we relate to each other and other life on the planet, and how thinking about values is influenced by our relationships.
Beever has published on a wide range of interrelated topics including ethics and biotechnologies, ethics pedagogy, biosemiotics, environmental
Websites
jonathan.beever.org
https://psu-us.academia.edu/