by Sarah Worth<\/p>\n
David Shaner may have \u201cretired\u201d as Herring Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies at the close of fall semester, but he is moving to an even more time-consuming and demanding job that he has created for himself.<\/p>\n
He will continue his management consulting work, helping American businesses retain and increase American jobs \u2014 a worthy cause if there ever was one. He has consulted for Duracell, Gillette, JW Aluminum, Ryobi, and Owens Corning Composites, to name a few, and has helped them to better understand the correlation of workplace happiness, retention and profit.<\/p>\n
He leaves quite a legacy at Furman. Most people on campus have heard the tales of the philosopher who barely sleeps (he only \u201cbreathes\u201d), eats one meal a day, served as a deputy sheriff, was Olympic Valley USA ski team material, is an Aikido master, and could pin any one of us on the floor with a single arm sweep.<\/p>\n
The legends are true, but even better is the reality that we\u2019ve seen every day. Since joining the philosophy faculty in 1982, David has been a caring teacher, a prolific writer and editor, and a leader and role model for faculty and students alike. He was philosophy department chair for 15 years, during which we grew from four full-time philosophers to eight.<\/p>\n
He was also one of the founding members of Furman\u2019s Asian Studies department, now a vibrant program. And he brought the Place of Peace, a beautiful former Buddhist temple, from Japan to Furman \u2014 an undertaking that involved fundraising, consciousness raising, and five years of hard work.<\/p>\n
We will miss David\u2019s leadership, strength and wit. As one of his former students \u2014 I took the introductory philosophy course from him in 1990 \u2014 I know firsthand the impact of this dedicated and caring teacher. I would not be in the department without him, and I would likely not even be a philosopher.<\/p>\n
The power of good teaching is the real legacy that he leaves for all of us.<\/p>\n
The author, a 1992 graduate, is chair of the philosophy department.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Sarah Worth David Shaner may have \u201cretired\u201d as Herring Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies at the close of fall semester, but he is moving to an even more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":1274,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}