• About
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    In 2009, Zaytuna College was founded in Berkeley, California, with a mission that called for grounding students in the Islamic scholarly tradition as well as in the cultural currents and critical ideas shaping modern society.

  • Academics
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    As a Muslim liberal arts college in the West, Zaytuna offers a curriculum that provides its students with a foundation in the intellectual heritage of two major world civilizations: the Islamic and the Western.

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  • Admissions & Aid
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    Our mission is to educate students to become morally, intellectually, and spiritually accomplished individuals ready to contribute to our contemporary world in ways that are proportionate to their gifts and to the needs of human society.

     

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  • Campus Life
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    Zaytuna’s campus is on Holy Hill and students enter the College as part of a cohort, a community of learners that travel together through the curriculum.

Phillbert Cheng

Lecturer

Phillbert Cheng

Biography

Email: phillbertcheng@zaytuna.edu

Office hours: By appointment

Dr. Phill Cheng is a scholar of ancient and late antique philosophy. His research interests include Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Thomism. At Zaytuna College, he has taught Material Logic, Formal Logic, Philosophy, and Plotinus's Enneads.

Dr. Cheng received his BA in Philosophy from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2005 and his MA in Philosophy from Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in 2008. He earned his PhD in Philosophical Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in 2022.

His PhD thesis, titled “Likeness and Unlikeness in Proclus Diodochus and Dionysius the Areopagite,” undertakes a fresh analysis of late Neoplatonic and Dionysian henology in examining how likeness and unlikeness figure within Dionysius’s conception of creatures as finite and composite images of the infinite and simple Creator.

Mr. Cheng is proficient in Latin, Attic Greek, and Late Antique Greek.

Mr. Cheng joined the faculty of Zaytuna College in Fall 2017.

Education

Education



  • Graduate Theological Union, PhD, Philosophical Theology, 2022

  • Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, MA, Philosophy, 2008

  • Saint Mary’s College of California, BA, Philosophy, 2005