Rebekah Rice
Co-interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences; Professor and Chair of Philosophy
Email: ricer@spu.edu
Phone: 206-281-2080
Office: Marston Hall 213
Education: BA, Seattle Pacific University, 1996; MA, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2000; PhD, Brown University, 2007. At SPU since 2007.
Dr. Rebekah Rice’s areas of expertise include Action Theory (including causal theories of action, agent causation, and free will), Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Religion. She teaches in these areas, as well as in Early Modern Philosophy.
Books
Death and Persistence
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022
The idea that physical death may not mark the end of an individual's existence has long been a source of fascination. It is perhaps unsurprising that we are apt to wonder what it is that happens to us when we die. Is death the end of me and all the experiences that count as mine? Or might I exist, and indeed have experiences, beyond the time of my death? And yet, deep metaphysical puzzles arise at the very suggestion that persons might continue to exist following physical death. Indeed, whether, and how, one can exist post-mortem will depend in no small part on what sorts of things we are and on what it takes for things like us to persist across temporal durations and other changes. These topics and their application to the growing collection of materialist accounts of resurrection are the focus of this book in the Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Religion series.
Selected Publications
"What's So Artificial and Intelligent about Artificial Intelligence? A Conceptual Framework for AI," in Michael A. Paulus, Jr. and Michael D. Langford (eds.), AI, Faith, and the Future. Pickwick/Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2022.
"Divine Simplicity," in Mark A. Lamport (ed.), The Handbook of Philosophy and Religion. Rowman and Littlefield, 2022.
Co-edited Special Issue (with Daniel McKaughan and Daniel Howard-Snyder) on approaches to faith, for the International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, volume 88 (2017).
"Mental Causation," in Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith, and Neil Levy (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Free Will. Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2016.
"Reasons and Divine Action: A Dilemma," in Kevin Timpe and Daniel Speak (eds.), Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns. Oxford University Press, 2016.
"Resurrection of the Body? Physicalism and the Possibility of Life after Death," Weter Faculty Award Lecture, SPU, 2012.
"Agent Causation and Acting for Reasons," American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011): 333-346.
"What is a Causal Theorist to Do about Omissions?" Modern Schoolman 88 (2011): 123-144.
Additional Resources
Please see Dr. Rice’s CV (.pdf) for a list of her publications.
Dr. Rice's website