My name is Gabriel.  I'm a Professor of Computer Science at a small southern liberal arts college.  I conduct research in Artificial Intelligence topics as they relate to mobile robotics.

I often say that I was brought up as a nonpracticing Catholic.  My intellectual formation as a Catholic has been extremely ad hoc as a result.  I began fully practicing the Catholic faith as an undergrad, but it took me many years to really begin to understand the teachings of the church.  Useful influences in my formation included the Catholic Answers web pages and contemporary apologetics texts from authors such as Scott Hahn and Peter Kreeft.  Also valuable, but only in retrospect, was a college philosophy course I took on Plato and Aristotle.

While a grad student, and attending a Dominican parish, I got into an argument with an evangelical friend about the Eucharist and found myself in the parish library perusing the Summa Theologica to get some insight.  This was my first real introduction to Thomistic thought.  One of the parish priests was quite helpful to me during this time.

In recent years, I discovered Edward Feser's blog and I have enjoyed reading the Last Superstition, Aquinas, and Philosophy of Mind.  I'm joining this forum in order to try to improve my understanding of the Thomistic perspectives on arguments for the existence of God as well as immateriality of the intellect.

The latter issue overlaps pretty strongly with issues that arise in my scholarly work as a computer scientist.  I have spent a fair amount of time trying to understand the Thomistic perspective here, and that is one of the reasons I have joined this forum.  I hope to start some threads about this and related topics over the coming weeks, time permitting as the fall semester will soon begin!