Dr. Bernie Cantens is a Philosophy Professor, Executive Vice President and Provost of Sul Ross State University. He is a first-generation Cuban American and is fluent in Spanish. He received his BA and MA in Accounting from Florida International University. He became a CPA and worked in the accounting industry during his early career. In 1992, Cantens returned to higher education and completed his BA in Philosophy, graduating Cum Laude and receiving an Academic Excellency Award in Philosophy and Religious Studies. He was awarded an Assistantship and a full-tuition scholarship to complete his MA and Doctoral degree in Philosophy at the University of Miami.

 

Cantens' specialization and teaching areas are Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Ethics for the Public's Health, Ethical Issues in Genetic Engineering, the Integration of Virtue Ethics and the Health Sciences, and related topics. 

 

He just completed a new book entitled A Critical Introduction to the Ethics of Abortion: Understanding the Moral Arguments. The book examines the most important and influential arguments advanced in the past fifty years. He is working on his second book on abortion called Abortion: Arguments from Potentiality. 

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Cantens was awarded the first American Philosophical Association Prize in Latin American Thought in 2004 and the American Philosophical Association William James Prize in 2005. He was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. His research and teaching have been awarded numerous prestigious competitive grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. In 2005, he received an NEH Fellowship for his research in American Pragmatism. In 2006, he received an NEH Summer Seminar Scholarship for his work on identity and ethnicity. In 2014, he received an NEH Enduring Questions Grant to develop a course on theories of peace. Cantens also participated in a CIC Online Humanities Instruction Grant supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation (2014-2016). 

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He has published numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, and reviews in his areas of specialization with prestigious publishers such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge Scholars, Brill Publishers, and Bloomsbury Publishers. Cantens serves on the editorial board of several journals and has served as the chair of several outside departmental evaluation review boards. 

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