Michael Teitelman

Michael Teitelman earned his Ph.D. from Princeton and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in the 1970s, at the same time teaching Contemporary Civilization.  He spent the next decade in medical training.  In the 1990s, he was an AIDS Psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Medical Center.

He has a private psychiatry practice and has recently begun training medical personnel in Guyana concerning the psychiatric care of HIV/AIDS patients. He also provides psychiatric evaluations for a legal group that represents people seeking political asylum in the United States.

In his very infrequent spare moments, he works on a manuscript entitled (tentatively): “Their Cruelty and Ours.”  It is, principally, but not only, a study of hand amputation in Sharia and cross-cultural judgment of cruelty in other cultures.

In 2002, he was offered the opportunity to return to Columbia to teach a section of Contemporary Civilization and has taught the course several times since then. He has always regarded CC as the course that was the cornerstone of his becoming an educated person—as he said, “when I started teaching it!”