Jonathan Beever, Ph.D.

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Department of Philosophy
University of Central Florida
Orlando, Florida
 
   
   
 
 

Welcome

Email: jonathan dot beever at ucf dot edu

Mailing Address: Department of Philosophy, 4111 Pictor Lane, University of Central Florida, 4111 Pictor Lane, Orlando, FL 32816

 

JonathanJonathan Beever is an ethicist and environmental philosopher focused on questions of values, relations, and digital technologies. He is currently Associate Professor of Ethics and Digital Culture in the Department of Philosophy and the Texts & Technology Ph.D. Program at the University of Central Florida. He completed postdoctoral appointments at both The Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University and the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University after taking his Ph.D. from Purdue's Department of Philosophy.

Beever is the co-founder and director of the UCF Center for Ethics, the director of the UCF Theoretical and Applied Ethics Graduate Certificate Program, and leads the Sound, Silence, and Environments lab.

Beever's research is focused broadly on the concept of ecological ethics, or the moral relationships among human and nonhuman animals, technologies, and environments. His research seeks to understand and impact the ways in which we all relate to and value ecological relationships at the intersections of digital and "analog" environments.

He is currently PI of an institutional transformation grant from the National Science Foundation (2020-2025) studying the intersections of individual value foundations and institutional ethics frameworks in the process of STEM enculturation. 

He co-organizes Ethically Speaking, an ethics lecture series hosted by the UCF Center for Ethics, and he previously co-founded the Purdue Lectures in Ethics, Policy, and Science, a seminar series in bioethics at Purdue University (www.purdue.edu/bioethics, and the Research Ethics Lecture Series at Penn State University (http://rockethics.psu.edu/events/event-collections/research-ethics-series). Beever has held fellowships with the Kaufmann Foundation in entrepreneurship, the Aldo Leopold Foundation in conservation ethics, and the Global Sustainable Soundscape Network in the ethics of soundscape ecology, among others.

He has co-authored several successful grant proposals in support of his research, which focuses on issues at the intersection of the living world and the biotechnologies that shape our human relationships within it. Beever has published on a wide range of interrelated topics including digital and environment ethics, ethics education and pedagogy, biosemiotics, and philosophical questions around simulation.

At the national level, Beever serves as Co-Director and Secretary of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP), as Board Member for the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), as a member of the Ethics Board of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and as an Editorial Board Member for the Online Ethics Center.

You can learn more about his book-length projects here:

Philosophy, Film,
                                    and the Dark Side of Interdependence
                                    2020The Way of
                                    Nature and the Way of Grace 2016Perspectives in Bioethics,
                                    Science, and Public Policy 2012

 

Featured Project
sound, silence, environments
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This project engages philosophical issues in soundscape ecology. Through this grant-funded work, Beever and his team examine soundscapes ecology from a scientific perspective but also its ethical and epistemic implications. Learn more about this work through a video here and visiting here.

Want to collaborate on this research? Contact Dr. Beever for more information about opportunities.