“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Dr. Christopher Foster says, pointing to the sky with a flourish of his toga.
While he doesn’t always wear costumes, Dr. Foster makes it a habit of speaking to his interests in a truly Socratic fashion. As a philosophy professor at the University of Arizona Global Campus, he experiences the fulfillment of sharing this longtime passion with his students, while incorporating external topics such as nature and mathematics to enrich his lessons.
“I got into this because I love philosophy,” he says. “I decided to be a professor because I love this discipline, and I want to share it with people.”
Dr. Foster doesn’t balk at the limitations of online study. He challenges his students to step outside of their environments to take on the world in a proactive manner, through incorporations of projects and tasks that mirror his own extracurricular activities.
Dr. Foster enjoys the outdoors with his family.
Taking Studies Outside
As a child, Dr. Foster spent ample time in the mountains of Santa Cruz, CA. This environment held a deep influence; it’s what kick-started his love of profound thinking and spending time in nature.
“Eventually, it evolved into me developing a passion for hoping to persuade my species to care more about protecting the natural world,” he says of his upbringing.
He gained more than just a love of the outdoors. To this day, he remains an activist and belongs to several organizations to support animal rights. A Utah resident, he volunteers his time as a member of the Utah Animal Rights Coalition, along with various pro-animal and environmental groups.
This ideation also extends to his students. In the early stages of his philosophy teachings, he established an emphasis on connecting with one’s surroundings. Alongside the late Dr. Clifford Blizard, together they built a service project into a five-week course that required students venture into their communities and get involved in unique ways.
Dr. Foster (right) shares a moment with his friend and colleague Dr. Clifford Blizard, who passed away in 2024.
The plan, he says, was for the class to be transformative.
Although the university operates remotely, Dr. Foster encourages his students to apply their studies to the real world as often as possible. Past projects have also included going outside in nature for an hour without distractions, and journaling about the experience.
Dr. Foster is working to expand his reach for this age-old discipline outside the classroom, albeit in a modern fashion. His future endeavors include not one, but two podcasts. The first one will cover logic topics and hold the title “This Podcast is False” as a riff on the liar paradox, which addresses the contradiction of reasoning. The other will cover animal rights and ethics, tentatively titled “Fellow Beings.”
Exploring Answers Across Disciplines
While philosophy is Dr. Foster’s main profession, he developed his original love of mathematics in high school. When he set out to earn a bachelor’s degree in math, he was pursuing a practical occupation interest. However, all it took was one philosophy class to kick-start a double major that continues to define his career today.
“I developed a love of math and found it to be one of the most profound things I'd ever experienced,” Dr. Foster says. But then, as an undergraduate at UC Davis, he discovered philosophy and had an epiphany:
“I found my home,” he says.
Luckily, he was able to marry the parallels of his fields of study into one blend of numbers and thought: logic.
“Logic, which is my specialty, is at the intersection of math and philosophy,” Dr. Foster explains. “I think that philosophy itself, when done well, can be rooted in precise, analytical, rational thought.”
Philosophizing at UAGC
Dr. Foster has been a faculty member at UAGC since 2013. During his professional teaching career, he moved to Utah and taught online at Brigham Young University (BYU) on a part-time basis before finding UAGC. This history of online teaching gave him a solid foundation to asynchronous study alongside his affinity for live learning.
Now, as an associate professor and the Program Chair of Philosophy, he teaches a variety of courses, from covering informal logic in PHI 103 to Honors 270, along with a favored PHI 208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning course alongside Dr. Julie Pedersen. In addition to these classes, he sits on the honors advisory board at UAGC.
“To me, ethics pairs well with logic, in that we're talking about how to reason carefully about what's right and wrong,” he says.
Providing a space for students to explore thinking on topics manifests a dream for Dr. Foster, which involves sharing his ideas and thoughts with like-minded beings at various stages of discovery.
“I knew that I loved math and philosophical problems, and I just wanted to solve them. And I thought, what better way than to be in a context around other philosophers who want to do deep thinking together, and come up with important ideas?” he says. “Students, also adult learners, with eager minds — they're finding a place for us to discuss them in a systematic, logical way, which is so enriching to me.”
Q & A: Getting to Know Dr. Christopher Foster
We recently spoke to Dr. Foster more in-depth to get a feel of his teaching style and what excites him about the world of philosophy. Read on to learn more about this beloved UAGC faculty member.
UAGC: What is the correlation between math and philosophy?
Dr. Foster: Much of the greatest philosophy was done by mathematicians, or inspired by math. So, mathematical thinking supplies the rational, logical foundation for careful philosophical thought.
After all, we're trying to basically derive truth. We're trying to figure out the fundamental principles behind our understanding of reality. To do that requires rigorous, precise, deep thinking, and so mathematical patterns of reasoning are actually, in my opinion, crucial to much of philosophy.
UAGC: What are some myths around philosophy that need debunking?
Dr. Foster: One myth I hear is this idea that philosophy is a version of psychology, or some version of just expressing your feelings, or being very eloquent at expressing matters of opinion.
I think what philosophy originally aspired to do was much higher than that, which was to dig deep. Dig beneath our opinions. Dig into even the opinion that the world exists at all. Of course, we could argue about anything about the world and our opinions, about politics or science or anything else, but philosophy will ultimately question everything and say, “How do we know what's real at all?”
UAGC: Why are philosophy and critical thinking more important than ever?
Dr. Foster: Our best hope of understanding each other comes from abstracting from our particular differences of feelings and opinions and saying, ‘what are the deeper principles involved?’ and ‘what ethical principle are you applying to arrive at this conclusion?’ and ‘how do you apply it?’
Let's analyze the logic that you use, to get from this set of facts to this certain set of conclusions. If we do that, we're speaking a kind of more universal language. Logic is like a universal language. It's called topic neutral. Logic applies no matter what discipline you're discussing. Logic is a universal system of careful thought.