Dr. Janice Chik Breidenbach is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University. She holds research affiliations at Oxford as Member of the Aquinas Institute, Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, where she was also a Visiting Research Scholar (in 2017 and 2019), and as Senior Affiliate of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Formerly, she was Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center (2023), as well as the Barry Research Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at University of Pennsylvania (2019-20).
Her research focuses on contemporary Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of action, metaphysics and science, and political philosophy. Her work has been published in Synthese, the Review of Metaphysics, Routledge, New Blackfriars, University of Cambridge Press, T&T Clark Edinburgh, and other venues, while being supported by research grants from the Royal Institute of Philosophy, the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, the Philosophical Quarterly Research Fund, and the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education. She has given scholarly talks at universities in the US and abroad, including: Edinburgh, Oxford, Sharif University of Technology (Iran), the Fashion Institute of Technology, Holy Cross, Saint Louis University, Princeton, Cambridge, KU Leuven, University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, and the University of St Andrews. She teaches with a historical approach: her courses have included philosophy of science, logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of action and mind, and philosophy of nature.
Beyond philosophy, she is classically trained in violin, piano, and voice. She has performed in several orchestras, both collegiate and professional, including the Princeton University Orchestra as Principal Chair and Associate Concertmaster, the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Delaware Valley Philharmonic Orchestra. During her musical career she performed public masterclasses with Andrew Manze, the Tackas Quartet, and the Brentano Quartet. She was the winner of the 14th annual Tampa Bay Symphony Young Artist's Competition, the Orlando Music Society Piano Competition, and was twice awarded first prize in the FSMTA State Concerto Competition. She sang in the Schola Cantorum Princetoniensis at Princeton University, and is currently the faculty advisor of the St Cecilia Chamber Music Society at Ave Maria University which promotes live instrumental performance in the field.
She is married to the intellectual historian Dr. Michael Breidenbach, with whom she has a son, Paul Thomas.
Please visit www.janicechik.com.
The sacrifice of motherhood is not a win-lose proposal. Genuine love for another edifies us and maybe even redeems us.
We need to find a way to recognize motherhood as the identity of a woman who is also a professional.
At first, children only know their own parents and that beginning of knowledge should make us realize the significance of that relationship.
Adoptive parents can help us to see how important it is to preserve that mystery about the other person.
Dr. Janice Tzuling Chik is Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida. She is also Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ave Maria University, Member of the Aquinas Institute at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, and Senior Affiliate of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously a Barry Foundation Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania (2019-20), and a Visiting Research Scholar (2017 and 2019) at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. She holds degrees in philosophy, public policy, and music performance from Princeton University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of St Andrews, UK. Her research spans the philosophy of action, metaphysics, and human rights, and has been published by Routledge, The University of Cambridge Press, The Review of Metaphysics, and New Blackfriars. She has delivered academic papers at Edinburgh, University of Pennsylvania, the Fashion Institute of Technology, KU Leuven, Notre Dame, Oxford, Princeton, and St Andrews.
Adoptive parents can help us to see how important it is to preserve that mystery about the other person.
At first, children only know their own parents and that beginning of knowledge should make us realize the significance of that relationship.
We need to find a way to recognize motherhood as the identity of a woman who is also a professional.
The sacrifice of motherhood is not a win-lose proposal. Genuine love for another edifies us and maybe even redeems us.
This chapter argues that the paradigm for conceptualizing human action should essentially refer to animal powers. It develops an animalist account of agency in the Aristotelian tradition, on which animal corporeality fundamentally informs the paradigm concept of action.
This essay argues that religion is a distinctive form of human activity, and offers a philosophical account of what religion fundamentally is (and what it is not), within the context of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
Are we animal agents? This chapter argues for the following claims: The concept of action in general is closely linked with that of animacy, i.e., the concept of being an animal. Thus causal exceptionalism for human agency, i.e., the claim that only human beings are agents, is false.
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