Svetlana Beggs
Svetlana Beggs entered the program in 2003 with a B.A. in philosophy from the Bay Area’s all-women’s liberal arts Mills College (1999), and an M.A. in philosophy from Arizona State University (2003). Her dissertation Wise Innocents and Naïve Moral Saints: Losing and Finding Simple Agency is chaired by David Glidden. Her essay on Aristotle’s and Plutarch’s conceptions of friendship, “Must We Point to Our Friends’ Moral Blemishes?”, is about to appear in Friends and Foes: Friendship and Conflict in Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). She is interested in a variety of questions in moral philosophy: Does reading good literature improve our moral characters? Is moral particularism a viable position? A native of St. Petersburg, Russia, Svetlana also likes to read good novels, play with her three-year-old daughter, and get out of the house to see good art and then talk about it.