MY TEACHING

Charity, Inclusion, and Application

These three principles (among others) guide my approach. I aim for students to reconstruct and engage with the best possible versions of arguments and philosophical perspectives, while encouraging conversations around canon construction, implementing inclusive and equitable pedagogical methods, and seeking to apply even the most abstract debates to lived experience.

Courses taught in-person, online/sync, and online/async:

• Intro to Philosophy

• Intro to Ethics

• Environmental Ethics

• Political Philosophy

SELECTED STUDENT REVIEWS

Consistently positive feedback from students

“Dr. Agoff was very clear, organized, and intelligible when explaining whatever topic we were going over during class. He makes sure that the students understand the topic and made the class very interesting.”

Student Review, UC Davis

“The clearness of what was expected greatly enhanced my learning because I was able to focus on the material. I wish he could teach the rest of my classes.”

Student Review, San Francisco State University

“This may be the best course I’ve taken in three years of college. He allowed me to learn and retain diverse information and new ways of thinking in a short amount of time....”

Student Review, San Francisco State University

MY RESEARCH

Specializing in Early Modern Philosophy

My research explores Descartes’s account of the emotions and his relation with the Catholic meditational genre. I surface philosophical themes in Teresa of Avila’s work, while also bringing these themes to bear on contemporary problems, like an epistemology of misinformation. I also dabble in environmental ethics, the philosophy of martial arts, and the philosophy of science.

Selected publications:

• “Teresa of Ávila, Infused Contemplation, and the Question of Her Influence Over René Descartes.”
  In Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, 2025.

  • Abstract: In the wake of the recent movement to resurface and explore historically underrepresented figures in the history of philosophy, Teresa of Ávila has notably received little attention among philosophers. Of the literature that has been produced, most of the discussion is around Teresa’s potential influence over Descartes’s evil demon argument. In this essay, I turn away from this debate and demonstrate that Teresa diverges from Descartes on key methodological issues. In particular, I show that Teresa is primarily interested in states of ‘infused contemplation’ – passive, supernatural cognitive states, while Descartes explicitly distances himself from relying on such states. Along the way, I argue that Teresa is deserving of further philosophical attention, but not because her work may have served as source material for Descartes’s Meditations.

• “Descartes on Intellectual Joy and the Intellectual Love of God.”
  In International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2024.

  • Abstract: Descartes maintains that we can love God and that it is pleasant and morally beneficial to do so. In this essay, I examine the necessary conditions for such an intellectual love of God. I argue that the intellectual love of God is incited by a judgment that we are joined to God in reality, which is constitutive of an intellectual joy. I go on to show that the intellectual love of God is, itself, constituted by a stripping of our private interests in favor of God’s divine will.

• “Experimentation, Distributed Cognition, and Flow: A Scientific Lens on Mixed Martial Arts.”
  In The Philosophy of Mixed Martial Arts: Squaring the Octagon, edited by J. Holt & M. Ramsay, Co-Authored with B. Gweyer & V. Keyser, 2024.

  • Abstract: Recent work by Keyser in applied epistemology of experiment has focused on the iterative ‘production’ of knowledge: knowledge stabilizes within a given physical context and it is iteratively tested within that context to meet standards of reliability. This implies that in a given physical context (e.g., laboratory), the inferences, methods/techniques, and physical products form coherence relations with one another. We apply this epistemological stabilization account to the martial arts in order to argue that the context of stabilization dictates the training methods, techniques, and even the philosophical concepts of a given martial arts system. We describe key elements of stabilization pertaining to rules, training methodology, warrior philosophy, and spectator/media tropes. The account of stabilization requires a case study that shows how a dynamic system is stabilized. We describe the stabilization of modern mixed martial arts by tracking it on a time scale, but also in different contexts (e.g., Pancrase, Pride, UFC).

• “Loving the Imageless: Descartes on the Sensuous Love of God.”
  In International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2023.

  • Abstract: Descartes claims that we can love God sensuously. However, it is prima facie unclear how this is possible, given that he is also committed to the impossibility of sensing or imagining God. In this essay, I show that Descartes has the metaphysical and psychophysical resources necessary to alleviate this tension. First, I discuss Descartes’s account of the intellectual love of God, demonstrating that the intellectual love of God constitutively involves the love of God’s creation. Second, I argue that an image of God’s creation is sufficient for communicating the intellectual love of God to the body, so as to produce a sensuous love of God. And third, I discuss Descartes’s reasons for developing an account of the sensuous love of God.

• “Measuring Things That Measure You: Martial Arts as a Model for Complex Epistemological Practices in Science.”
  In Philosophies, 2023.

• “Hello, We’re Philosophy in the Wild.”
  In Public Philosophy Journal, Co-Authored with M. Sidzinska and M. Gadomski, 2023

GET IN TOUCH

zacharyagoff@gmail.com