troy jollimore

TROY JOLLIMORE is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. He is the author of On Loyalty (Routledge, 2012), Love’s Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011),  and two collections of poems: At Lake Scugog (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie / Intuit House, 2006), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Jollimore studied in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1999. His dissertation, on the relation between normative theories of ethics and the requirements of friendship, was advised by Harry Frankfurt and Sarah Buss and was selected by Robert Nozick for Garland Publishing’s Studies in Ethics series. Before studying at Princeton, he was an undergraduate at the University of King’s College and in the Philosophy Department at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. After receiving his Ph.D. he taught at Georgetown University and the University of California, Davis, before coming to CSU Chico. He was selected as CSU Chico’s Outstanding Professor for the academic year 2009-2010.

Jollimore's philosophical articles have appeared in journals including Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and American Philosophical Quarterly and in collections including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Philosophers on Film) and Internal Reasons: Contemporary Readings (MIT, 2011). His poems have appeared in publications including Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and the New Yorker, and his essays and book reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, Barnes and Noble Review, Boston Review, Wilson Quarterly, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.

He was an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2006-2007 and the Stanley P. Young Poetry Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2012.

Jollimore’s areas of research interest include normative ethics, meta-ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of literature and film. He has taught courses on all of these topics, and on epistemology, ancient philosophy, the history of modern philosophy, and biomedical ethics, as well as a number of poetry workshops. His current philosophical research concerns weakness of will, libertarianism, and the nature of responsibility and deontological constraints. He is also at work on a book about the changing nature of the experience of moviegoing.

poems

"At Lake Scugog" 

"On the Origins of Things" 

"The Solipsist" 

"Regret" 

"Charlie Brown" 

reviews of TJ's works

Review of Love's Vision by Jeffrey Seidman (Ethics)

Review of Love's Vision (Los Angeles Review of Books

Review of Love's Vision (Philosophy in Review)

Metapsychology Review of Love's Vision 

"Dark Matters"

On Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour" 

Benefit for Dean Young (June 23, 2011)

Bookshop West Portal (1) (November 5, 2009)

Bookshop West Portal (2)  (November 5, 2009) 

"Cadden Bay" (read and animated by Grade 8 students at Toronto's Voice Intermediate School)