Tammy Nyden

Scholar, Speaker, Advocate for Children's Mental Health Justice and Caregiver Justice

Teaching

Teaching by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Dr. Nyden is a member of the philosophy department at Grinnell College. As a transdisciplinary scholar, their courses also contribute to the following programs and concentrations:

  • Gender Women and Sexuality Studies Program
  • Education Studies Concentration
  • European Studies Concentration
  • Neuroscience Concentration
  • Science, Medicine, and Society Concentration

She regularly teaches:

  • PHI 111 Introduction to Philosophy
  • PHI 233 History of Early Modern Philosophy
  • PHI 243 Epistemic Injustice and Resistance
  • PHI 257 Philosophy of Science
  • PHI 393: Advanced Seminar in the History of Philosophy. Past topics include:
    • Spinoza’s Politics
    • Spinoza’s Ethics
    • Women in Early Modern Philosophy: A Feminist Approach
    • Spinoza and Radical Enlightenment
    • Descartes and Cartesianism
    • Women and Cartesianism
    • Spinoza and Relational Autonomy

And often teaches special topics courses. Topics include:

  • Children’s Mental Health justice
  • Asian Philosophy
  • The School-to-Prison Pipeline
  • Digital Stories for Social Justice
  • Mental Health Policy and Outreach
  • Space, Time and Motion
  • The History of Scientific Thought
  • Chinese Philosophy (Spring 2025)

Their previous tutorial topics are:

  • A Woman’s Place
  • What Counts as Philosophy as Why?
  • Joy
  • Cultivating Joy
  • Abolitionist Care

She also mentors independent student research in the forms of Mentored Advanced Projects, Independent Studies, Plus 2’s, and Melon Mayes Undergraduate Fellowship Projects. Topics have included:

  • Autistic Standpoint Theory
  • History of the Grinnell College Philosophy Department
  • Philosophy and Colonialism
  • Trans Epistemic Justice
  • Carceral Logics and School
  • Epistemic Justice Care
  • School-to-Prison Pipeline
  • Epistemology of Protest
  • Epistemology of Resistance and Epistemic Virtue
  • Social Forces on Individual Health
  • The Spectrum of Bare Life: Biopolitical Productivity, Social Death, and the Case of the Cambodian Refugee
  • Feyerabend’s Pluralistic Methodology Through the Study of Native American Science and Philosophy
  • Moral Certainty
  • Language Thru Metaphysics
  • Early Modern Ethical Theories
  • Non-European 17th and 18th century philosophers
  • Unraveling Dualism
  • Newton’s Sciences