Joseph “Duke” Filonowicz is an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, award-winning university teacher, and published author in the field of moral philosophy (Fellow-Feeling and the Moral Life, Cambridge University Press, 2008/14).  He earned the Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1985.  Over a nearly forty-year career in teaching philosophy in Columbia College, Barnard College, Pomona College, Mercyhurst College and Long Island University-Brooklyn, he worked with (literally) thousands of students as they pursued higher education.  He recently retired from LIU-Brooklyn after thirty-four years of full-time teaching there, where he developed such innovative elective courses as “Nineteenth-Century Social Thought: The Dispossessed,” “Philosophy of Sex and Love,” “Special Seminar: Freud,” “Existence in Black,” and “American Philosophy: Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, and Black Existentialism.”

Professor Filonowicz sees his work as a philosophical counselor as a natural extension of his teaching work, which guided students in exploring issues in applied ethics (both social and personal), informal logic and critical reasoning, history of ideas, and philosophy of law.  He has offered his services to second and fourth-grade elementary school children and high school juniors and seniors, as well as to college students of all ages.  He is currently a “Reading Partner” under the auspices of AmeriCorps.  He is also working on two new books, one on gratitude and ingratitude (“The Ungrateful Biped”) and another under the working title “Freud for Teens,” both addressed to the general reading public.