Full name: Micah Whitefield Newman

Marital status: married to Deidra Michelle Collier (now Deidra Collier Newman) on October 12, 2002

Children:

• Laurel Frances Newman, b. July 2, 2004
• John Sebastian Collier Newman, b. April 27, 2007

POB: Dallas, TX

Places lived:
Dallas, TX (1976)
Palo Alto, CA (1976–1978)
Boise, ID (1978–1982)
Singapore (1982–1988)
Whittier, CA (1988–1997)
Woodbridge, CA (1997–1999)
Austin, TX (1999–present)

Religion: Christian. My background is evangelical Protestant, but I consider myself first simply a "mere Christian:" I assent to the Nicene Creed and strive to be as ecumenical as I can be.

Memberships:

• Society of Christian Philosophers (since 2004)
• International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (since 2007)

• B.S. in Biology, Westmont College, August 1994 – December 1997; graduated Cum laude (was pre-med, but subsequently did not get into medical school)
• Spent one semester in a doctoral program in organic chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin, Fall 2000.
• Spent one semester in a Master of Liberal Arts program at St. Edward's University, Austin, Spring 2001.

Favorite music
Alternative/indie "rock"
Cocteau Twins, Yo La Tengo, Throwing Muses/Kristin Hersh, Paik, Slowdive, Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai, Echo & The Bunnymen, Boards of Canada, His Name Is Alive, Red House Painters, The Black Keys, Sonic Youth, Stella Luna, Experimental Aircraft, The Autumns, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver, Jimi Hendrix, Lycia, Pixies, Guided By Voices, They Might Be Giants, Ride, Airiel...
Jazz
Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane, Roy Haynes, John Scofield, Pat Metheny, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Brad Mehldau, Grant Green, Ahmad Jamal, Sam Rivers, Sun Ra...
Classical composers
J.S. Bach, Franz Schubert, W.A. Mozart, Ludwig Beethoven, G.F. Handel, F.J. Haydn, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Igor Stravinsky, Gustav Holst, John Williams, Howard Shore...
The "ambient" corner
lovesliescrushing and other wavertone "bands", Harold Budd, Thom Brennan, Windy & Carl, FiRES WERE SHOT, Mike VanPortfleet, Steve Roach, head | phone | over | tone, the high impedance...

Favorite authors
C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Kreeft, P.G. Wodehouse, Richard Feynman, Thomas Sowell, Billy Collins, Dallas Willard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leo Tolstoy, Peter van Inwagen, John Polkinghorne, Walker Percy...

Favorite movies
Star Wars (original trilogy), Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (extended version), The Road Home, Heat, The Straight Story, The Breakfast Club, Chariots of Fire, American Graffiti, Groundhog Day, Koyaanisqatsi, Waking Life, Faraway, So Close!, The Gospel of John, Rear Window, To Kill a Mockingbird, anything by Pixar...

Philosophy
In September 2003, I sort of stumbled upon philosophy, and found what I quickly came to recognize as my niche. It so fits who I am, I always marvel at how long it took me to discover it; it just took a fortuitous conjunction of happenstance to bring it about. Philosophy, to me, is the looking into and behind things to educe hidden relationships between things: that is, abstract things such as concepts, substances, and essences. Such pursuits I find to be very stimulating and satisfying for their own sake.

Areas of interest:
metaphysics: ontology, properties, modal logic, supervenience, personal identity, realism/antirealism
philosophy of mind: subjectivity, externalism, qualia, color, concepts, the mind/body problem
philosophy of chemistry: elements, the Periodic Table, models, explanation, substance concepts

Favorite philosophers:

• Aristotle
• St. Thomas Aquinas
• Thomas Reid
• Søren Kierkegaard
• G.E. Moore
• Saul Kripke
• Peter van Inwagen

• David Hume
• W.V. Quine
• David Lewis

• Aristotle – The Metaphysics
• Søren Kierkegaard – Concluding Unscientific Postscript
• Ludwig Wittgenstein – On Certainty
• Saul Kripke – Naming and Necessity
• Roderick Chisholm – Person and Object
• John Paul II – Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body
• C.L. Hardin – Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow
• Peter van Inwagen – Material Beings

• Scott Shalkowski – "Logic and Absolute Necessity"
• Saul Kripke – "Identity and Necessity"
• Peter van Inwagen – "Modal Epistemology"
• Peter van Inwagen – "Genesis and Evolution" (the first half)
• Hilary Putnam – "Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized"
• Robert M. Adams – "Primitive Thisness and Primitive Identity"
• Sydney Shoemaker – "Causality and Properties"
• Mark Johnston – "Human Beings"

• Peter van Inwagen – "Materialism and Dualism: Jerusalem and Athens?"
• Eleonore Stump – "Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism Without Reductionism"
• Alvin Plantinga – "Actualism and Possible Worlds"
• Keith DeRose – "Solving the Skeptical Problem"
• Peter van Inwagen – "The Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts"
• Peter van Inwagen – "Temporal Parts and Identity Across Time"
• P.F. Strawson – "On Referring"
• Ned Markosian – "How Fast Does Time Pass?"
• Donald Davidson – "Mental Events"
• Donald Davidson – "Actions, Reasons, and Causes"
• Thomas Nagel – "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"
• Michael Tye – "Phenomenal Consciousness: The Explanatory Gap as Cognitive Illusion"
• Daniel Dennett – "Quining Qualia"

• "Chemical Supervenience", Foundations of Chemistry, 10 (2008), 49–62

• "Fine-Tuning Is Not Causal Ramification" (a response to Cory Juhl's "Fine-Tuning Is Not Surprising")
• "Chemical Supervenience and Introductory Chemical Education" (incomplete)
• "Mereology and Meta-ontology, OR, Is Mereology Ontologically Interesting?" (needs revision)
• "Restricted Mereology and Wholes as Essential to Their Parts" (needs revision)
• "Constitution, Supervenience, Identity: A Unified Theory"

• "Property Closure and Intrinsicness"
• "Hylomorphist Materialism and the Possibility of Resurrection"
• "On Two Arguments from Desire"
• "Chemical Composition"
• "Anomalous Monism as an Epistemological Thesis"
• "Fragile-Rigidity: A Prolegomena for a Fully Ramified Essentialism"
• "Varieties of Modal Skepticism"
• "Life, Death, and Nonexistence"
• "Wittgenquine: Behavior, Pragmatics, Holism"
• "Truthmakers for Modal Propositions: Theistic Realism as an Alternative to Magical Ersatzism"
• "Endurantism as Intraworld Essentialism"
• "Against Disjunctive Properties"
• "Necessarily Contingent Identities"
• "Incommensurable Realms of Possible Worlds"
• "Plantinga's Augustinian Science"
• "The Peculiar Predicament of the Christian Philosopher"
• "Atheistic Counterfactuals"

  Last updated: 7/21/08