Professors Emeriti and Others
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Daniel Vaillancourt, PhD
About
Dan Vaillancourt was Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University. He earned his BA in French Literature and Philosophy from St. Francis College, Biddeford, Maine, and his PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University, Chicago, in 1976. His dissertation was entitled Stanislas Breton: The Principle of Human Transcendence; Man Making the World. He received a Fulbright Grant for dissertation research in Paris from 1971鈥�72.
Dr. Vaillancourt came to the philosophy department in 1990 with the affiliation of Loyola University and Mundelein College. He had taught at Mundelein College for eighteen years, where he had also served as Chairperson of Humanities for five years and Dean of the Masters in Liberal Studies Program for three years.
Dr. Vaillancourt's primary areas of research are aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty, virtue, and philosophy of human nature.
Dr. Vaillancourt considers aesthetics his expertise and passion. He completed formal training in the field by specializing at the doctoral level in phenomenology and existentialism, with extensive study in the intersection of philosophy and literature. He has won 15 regional and national grants and over a dozen teaching awards/ commendations. He has created and taught 12 undergraduate and graduate courses in aesthetics, ranging from Catholic Aesthetics and Philosophical Themes in Nobel Prize Literature to Philosophy and Theatre, and, of course, Aesthetics. His publications include two books, over a hundred articles, and three translations. He also edited a national magazine, Life Beat, for four years. Currently, he is writing a four-volume work, Beauty As Virtue (Lookism; A New Dimension of Beauty; Extreme Beauty; Beauty as Virtue), and he is leading the World Institute for Extreme Beauty at the renowned Walker House in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Dr. Vaillancourt dances and plays the tenor recorder. Like Dostoevsky, he believes beauty changes the world.
To learn more about Dr. Vaillancourt, go to his Institute website:.
Degrees
DePaul University
Research Interests
Aesthetics, philosophy of human nature, contemporary French philosophy, philosophy of religion