About
D. Gregory MacIsaac is Associate Professor of Humanities at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He has taught in the Bachelor of Humanities program since 1998. He grew up in Antigonish County, Nova Scotia, entering the Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s College – Dalhousie (Halifax) in 1988. He took his B.A. degree in 1992 from the Dalhousie Department of Classics, in Ancient Languages and Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and his M.A. (1996) and Ph.D. (2001) at the Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame (Indiana), with a thesis on the soul in Proclus, under the direction of Stephen Gersh.
He spent the academic year 1994-95 visiting the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte (Higher Institute of Philosophy) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, studying Neoplatonism and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. In 2005-06 he was a Chercheur Étranger at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and C.N.R.S., Paris. In 2011-12 he was a visiting research at the Plato Centre, Trinity College Dublin, and at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. In 2019-20 he was Chercheur Associé, at the Laboratoire ‘Logiques de l’Agir’, Université de Franch-Comté, Besançon, France.
Professor MacIsaac spent twenty years working on aspects of the soul’s knowledge in the Neoplatonist Proclus. More recently, he has begun working on Plato, with a major research project on the dialogues
Theaetetus,
Parmenides, and
Sophist.
In the Bachelor of Humanities, Professor MacIsaac’s main duty is HUMS 2000, the second-year Core-Humanities Seminar,
Reason and Revelation. This is an intensive course on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, covering authors from Plato to Dante. Professor MacIsaac also teaches HUMS 3500,
Ancient and Medieval Intellectual History, whose topic is often the dialogues of Plato. He has also taught a number of fourth-year Research Seminars on topics such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Eriugena, Hegel, and Heidegger. Prof. MacIsaac currently teaches HUMS 1200,
Humanities and Classical Civilization, the required first-year Humanities writing course.
Prof. MacIsaac is an award-winning teacher. At Carleton he has won:
- Provost’s Teaching Fellowship
- Teaching with Technology Award
- Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Award
- Teaching Achievement Award
