Marga Vega
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Office phone: (510) 883-2077
E-mail: mvega@dspt.edu
Professor Vega has several philosophical interests with an underlying common theme: the theory of knowledge, its reach and limitations. With that philosophical problem as a background, she has studied the cognitive mechanisms behind metaphor; the relation between language and thought; the rationality of aesthetic expression; the rationality of science and of what lies beyond science. She is also interested how rationality is fleshed out in the person and in the human interactions. She has taken over thirty courses in Theology and is concerned with providing Theology students a philosophical framework that they can apply to Theology.
Professor Vega completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy in Spain. As an undergraduate she studied the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and current philosophers that have taken that tradition one step further. During her Ph. D. she focused on Contemporary Theory of Knowledge and the Philosophy of Language. During that time she visited Stanford University and collaborated with the Music Department of the University of Valladolid in the creation of a research group SITEM (Interdisciplinary Seminar for Music and Philosophy) that organized four conferences and started the publication “Music and Philosophy”. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley she researcher further on metaphor. She visited the Linguistics Department where she attended courses on Cognitive Science and Metaphor (George Lakoff) and Philosophy of Mind and Language (John Searle). After her postdoctoral appointment she worked as a Lecturer at UCB, taught courses on Philosophy of Mind, and assisted other professors in courses on Ancient Philosophy (Alan Code), Philosophy of Mind (John Searle), Philosophy of Language (John Searle), and Philosophy of Science (Prof. Skokowski). She was also Assistant Prof. at the University of Valladolid, Spain. She is currently part of the Seminar of Social Philosophy at UCB that in 2008 organized the 6th International Conference on Collective Intentionality in Berkeley.
Professor Vega is concerned with providing bridges between different, and sometimes rival, philosophical traditions and schools: Analytic and Continental Philosophy and Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy. She believes that the interaction of different traditions can complement the limitations and deficiencies that every philosophical system entails. She is also interested in reaching different kinds of students: believers and unbelievers; students with different religious background; professional and amateur philosophers; students with a background in Medieval Philosophy and Students with a background in Contemporary Philosophy; students interested in Philosophy and students interested in Theology with instrumental interest in Philosophy. While keeping the standards of precision and accuracy that the academic work requires, Professor Vega’s efforts are to make Philosophy accessible to everyone. For newcomers Professor. Vega tries to make Philosophy comprehensible and applicable to everyday life. For students with previous Philosophical background, she encourages them to go further (duc in altum: “to put out into the deep”), to focus on the central problems of philosophy, to keep attention to detail and to primary texts while not losing the bigger picture of the philosophical enterprise.
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