Phil Farnsworth

Teodros Kiros

Associate Professor
Affiliated Departments
Liberal Arts and Sciences
Faculty Bio E-Mail
tkiros@berklee.edu
Telephone
617-747-2877

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Teodros Kiros is considered a leading authority on moral philosophy and a leading voice in African philosophy. He has been a W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University for the past 20 years and has been nominated three times for Berklee's Distinguished Faculty Award. 

Kiros is the producer and host of the internationally acclaimed television program African Ascent, which continually gives visibility to Berklee faculty and includes interviews with President Roger H. Brown and Provost Larry Simpson. He is also an essayist for leading websites and has published hundreds of articles in refereed journals and online. He's also a columnist for leading newspapers.

Career Highlights
  • Philosopher and novelist
  • Has had short stories and an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Cambridge Days, featured on Bridgeportword.com
  • Author and/or editor of 13 books including Towards the Construction of Political Action; Moral Philosophy and Development; Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values: Truth, Language and Desire; Explorations in African Political Thought; Multiculturalism;  Zara Yacob: Rationality of the Human Heart; Philosophical Essays; Ethiopian Discourse; Hirut and Hailu and Other Short Stories; and Cambridge Days; and the forthcoming Self-Definition: A Philosophical Inquiry from the Global South and Global North
  • W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University
  • Executive producer and host of the television program African Ascent
Awards
  • Winner of the 1999 Michael Harrington Book Award—Author for Self-Construction and the Formation of Human Values: Truth, Language, and Desire
Education
  • Ph.D., Kent State University
In Their Own Words

"I think the artistic temperament is a special kind of temperament. It's a treasure for me to equip musicians with a grounding in ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology (the theory of knowledge), which are the dimensions of the kind of philosophy that I teach, the kind of philosophy about which I've been writing for 30 years.

"I make [my classes] relate to music philosophically. There is a course, for example, called Philosophy of Education, which is directly related to education in music, with a philosophical dimension added to it. Philosophy provides a purpose, a meaning, and an appreciation for thinking that musicians need to be aware of.

"To musicians who are writers, the kind of practices that we do in the classroom—writing philosophical essays and short stories—emphasize the importance of literacy in writing, and this directly relates itself to musicians, particularly those who write music. And so the students themselves become literate writers. They appreciate literature, they understand it, they can analyze it, can take positions against it and on its behalf, and they, more importantly, may want to write about their own music for newspapers, magazines, websites, and many other venues.

"I try to argue that they can become better musicians if they become philosophically trained. They will become sensitive to aesthetics in their lives, to the role that art plays in their lives. They will become sensitive to ethics, which means that they will have to make conscious, vigilant, and careful analysis of why they do music. Do they do it merely because they could generate money, or do they do it to train the public? The courses that they take from me add purpose and value."