I am an adjunct instructor in philosophy and ethics at Saint Petersburg College’s Ethics Institute and at Hillsborough College’s Humanities Program. I teach Ethics Beyond Boundaries (EBB), a course I designed to give college students — many working significant hours in institutional contexts — the analytical tools to understand how structural conditions shape moral perception, agency, and coordination. The course integrates traditional ethical frameworks with formal models of institutional behavior drawn from information theory, complexity theory, math and logic formal representations and simulations, and interdisciplinary scientific research.

As a class instructor, my goals are to help each student grasp their own personal opportunities and achieve a strong sense of meaning though self-reflection, and do so while enjoying the process.  I may not always succeed but I want you to know that is my guiding alignment as your instructor. What follows here may be much more than you want to know, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I want to give you my own “assembly history” on how I have come to be the person you meet in class.

My current research program, the Principia Agentialis (PA), develops a formal science of agency through five integrated components: a formal framework modeling multi-scale agential organization; an information-theoretic foundation for the irreducibility of private perspectival interiors; an Institutional Parasite State diagnostic for measuring structural limits of organizational recovery capacity; Self-reflective modeling the conditions for sustained ethical agency under institutional pressure; and the dual-aspect bridge connecting first-person phenomenological experience to third-person empirical measurement. Applied work has produced an empirically testable FHRI (Functional Health Resilience Index), grounded in publicly verifiable data.  In one research empirical project in Florida we used information  such as Form 990 data from Florida correctional and reentry institutions.

My path to philosophy was unconventional in ways that inform both my research and my pedagogy. I married at seventeen, earned a night school high school diploma from Dayton Public Night School, and was admitted to Ohio University’s newly formed Honors College, where I skipped the bachelor’s degree and became a graduate assistant in the Philosophy Department after a single year of undergraduate work. I completed his Master’s thesis, “Kant, Reichenbach, and the Synthetic A-Priori,” under Warren Ruchti (Assistant Professor; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, where Warren's studies overlapped with Nelson Goodman  and with Israel Scheffler's 2019s doctoral work under Goodman before Scheffler moved to Harvard), in August 1969. My work with Professor Ruchti and at Ohio University attracted national attention, with offers from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and other major programs. I chose Indiana University because it housed the only History and Philosophy of Science Department in the world at the time, a program founded by Norwood Russell Hanson.  Financial support from the department enabled me to explore philosophy and history of science as well as graduate and research science with five years of funding at a level comparable to a full-time community college salary and a graduate community drawn from Australia, India, Cambridge, and beyond.

In the summer of 1969, as I prepared to leave for Indiana, the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle visited Ohio University on an American lecture tour. I was assigned to escort him by driving him to meetings and attending his public lectures. Ryle asked me what I intended to study. When I answered “Philosophy of Science”, Ryle replied with a sentence I remember to this day and repeat often: "Son, there is no such thing as philosophy of" meaning simply that all of the “branches and divisions of philosophy and science” is just philosophy. The remark has shaped my approach to a discipline that has spent much of its history policing its own sub-disciplinary boundaries.

At Indiana (1969–1974) I worked with Wesley Salmon on induction and statistical inference, Adolf Grünbaum, internationally renowned philosopher of space and time, my special interest, Alberto Coffa (Grünbaum’s distinguished student from Pittsburgh) on the semantic tradition from Kant to Carnap, Michael Dunn and Robert Meyer on relevance logics and computation (students of Anderson and Belnap at Pittsburgh), and Thomas Sebeok on animal communication and bio-semiotics. Clark Glymour had just completed his doctorate in the same program. Ron Giere was junior faculty, still developing what would become the model-based approach to scientific theories formalized in Scientific Perspectivism (2006).  These people were very special to me and their contributions to my life are gratefully acknowledged here. Throughout my life, I have had opportunities to work with amazing people whose influence continues to this day.  

With Sebeok, I undertook an early attempt to formalize Peirce’s triadic sign-interpretant structure using a theory of types model, designing entities called Orgs that operated as agents syntactically connected within a hierarchy of language levels now recognizable as a fractal multi-scale architecture. In collaboration with Nancy Woo, a student of Noam Chomsky in the Indiana University Linguistics Department, I co-authored work demonstrating that Chomsky’s claim of recursive natural language is at best recursively enumerable — a distinction with significant implications for the boundary between generative and verifiable formal systems. A 1990 Stanford conference introduced me to Peter Aczel’s Anti-Foundation Axiom, whose implications for self-referential and circular systems I have developed fully only in relation to my current research program.

I left Indiana to support my family, joining a company whose founders included associates of the IU president, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, and sports broadcaster Chris Schenkel.  I became the Director of Training and assistant to the president of that company and then subsequently built and sold my own company, retiring from business in 1982 and drawing on that capital since to support independent research while holding adjunct and associate positions.  

I then moved to Florida where I taught history and philosophy of science and also the capstone course in Business Ethics at Eckerd College.  While at Eckerd, I also taught Logic and ethics at the University of South Florida while taking graduate classes.  I also wrote and lectured at Ethics and Philosophy conferences which resulted in an offer to become a Senior Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University's Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics

At CAAE I co-authoring Ethical Issues in Professional Life with Peter Madsen (Applied Ethics Project, 1988) and producing television programs broadcast on PBS educational stations throughout the United States and in English-speaking countries internationally. II worked with the Annenberg Foundation for the PBS extension of Ethics in America PBS series.  Traveled internationally lecturing on Applied Ethics and developing Ethics programs for organizations and corporations. My work included doing workshops at national government and major fortune 500 corporations.  While at the CAAE, I had the opportunity to work in teams with Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winning polymath on several projects.  

I then was offered an opportunity to join the Ethics Center at the University of South Florida with Peter French, where he was developing applied ethics to sport and was organizing the first international conference on “Ethics and Sport”.   While there I produced the first Sports Ethics telecourse package, authoring the text and study guide published by Kendall-Hunt (2001). I developed and taught this course face to face while developing an online sports ethics course package that some terms included a thousand students at the University of South Florida.  This course content was purchased by hundreds of colleges and universities in many countries.

I have taught philosophy and ethics at Saint Petersburg College’s Ethics Institute and at Hillsborough College’s Humanities Program, using both appointments to develop and beta-test the Ethics Beyond Boundaries curriculum. My forty years of professional experience in video production, including my personal interview footage developed ove the years with, for example,  Roger Boisjoly (the NASA engineer who attempted to prevent the Challenger disaster), Father Saad Sirop Hanna, and John Hope Franklin, serve as pedagogical materials in the EBB course.

The Examined Life online AI assisted application and The Navigator online AI assisted applicaton are two of the applied instruments of the PA research program.  It is a personal philosophy development application helping students and practitioners track their own coherence across six domains, engage an AI Companion in reflective dialogue, and identify the structural conditions shaping their experience of agency. I has been married to Janet (Schweller) Mertzman for fifty-nine years; they have two children and four grandchildren.

Education and Training

A formative encounter before Indiana: in the summer of 1969 Gilbert Ryle visited Ohio University. When Mertzman told him he planned to study Philosophy of Science, Ryle replied: \u201cSon, there is no such thing as philosophy of\u2026\u201d \u2014 meaning it is all just philosophy.

1969   Master of Arts in Philosophy, Ohio University

Thesis: “Kant, Reichenbach, and the Synthetic A-Priori.” Supervisor: [name — student of Nelson Goodman and Israel Scheffler]. Admitted to the Honors College; completed the degree in one year of graduate work following a single year of undergraduate study.

1969–1974   Doctoral study, History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University

Five years of full doctoral funding. Primary supervisors: Wesley Salmon (philosophy of science and statistical inference), Adolf Grünbaum (philosophy of physics and space-time), Alberto Coffa (semantic tradition from Kant to Carnap), Michael Dunn and Robert Meyer (relevance logics and computation), Thomas Sebeok (biosemiotics and animal communication), Ron Giere (philosophy of science and scientific modeling). Doctoral study not completed; left to support family.

1970   Night school high school diploma, Dayton Public Night School

Academic and Professional Positions

Current   Adjunct Instructor, Ethics Institute, Saint Petersburg College

Current   Adjunct Instructor, Humanities Program, Hillsborough College

Current   Independent researcher, Principia Agentialis research program

c. 2000s–2010s   Adjunct Instructor, Department of Education, University of South Florida

Taught the Sports Ethics telecourse with university approval to use his written and produced published books by Kendall-Hunt and his Philosophy Lab Corporation 26 program video series “Issues in Sport” shown on educational Public broadcasting Stations nationally and sold video materials to over hundreds of colleges and universities in English speaking nations.

c. 1985–1990s   Associate Researcher, Center for the Advancement of Applied Ethics, Carnegie Mellon University

Co-authored Ethical Issues in Professional Life (1988). Produced PBS educational television programs broadcast nationally and internationally.

c. 1974–1982   Business career (independent company; sold 1982)

Publications

Books

•  Mertzman, Robert, and Peter Madsen. Ethical Issues in Professional Life. Pittsburgh: The Applied Ethics Project, 1988.

•  Mertzman, Robert. Sports Ethics [text and study guide]. Dubuque: Kendall-Hunt, 2001.

Working Papers (May 2026)

•  Principia Agentialis: A Formal Research Program for the Science of Agency. Working paper, Ethics Institute, Saint Petersburg College.

•  Sheaf Logic and Perspectival Agreement: A Formal Extension of Perspectival Realism. In preparation.

•  The Architecture of Agency: A Meta-Framework for Structure, Mechanism, Perspective, and Active Inference. Working paper.

•  When Compliance Masks Capacity: Structural Limits on Recovery in Institutional Systems. In preparation.

•  Institutional Dark Coherence and Goal Assembly Collapse. Working paper.

•  Beyond the WEIRD Horizon: Global Worldview Cartography and the Practice of Ethical Coordination. In preparation for Journal of Philosophy of Education.

Earlier work  · Presented 

•  Mertzman, Robert, and Nancy Woo. [Mathematical linguistics paper on recursive vs. recursively enumerable language, Presented at the Summer Linguistics Conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz  c. 1971.

Research Interests

•  Formal science of agency: category theory, sheaf logic, Generalized Holographic Principle, Constructor Theory

•  Institutional dark coherence and structural limits of organizational recovery capacity

•  Perspectival realism: sheaf-theoretic conditions for perspectival agreement and cohomological obstruction

•  Philosophy of education: global worldview cartography, cross-cultural ethical coordination, disciplined pluralism

•  Biosemiotics and the continuity between biological competency and ethical agency

•  Non-well-founded set theory (Anti-Foundation Axiom) and self-referential closure in formal models of agency

•  Applied ethics: correctional systems, healthcare institutions, social media platforms, reentry organizations

Selected Video Production and Media

Forty years of professional video production experience. Interview footage archives include Roger Boisjoly (NASA engineer, Challenger disaster), Father Saad Sirop Hanna, and John Hope Franklin. PBS educational television programs (Carnegie Mellon period) broadcast nationally and in English-speaking countries. Sports Ethics telecourse package (USF period) broadcast on educational television. Current production focused on EBB course materials.

Prepared May 2026.