Philosophy Faculty

William Bracken (Ph.D., Harvard University). His primary research interests lie in the areas of phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of psychoanalysis. He is especially interested in difficulties that insights from these areas pose for common conceptions of mind and human agency, as well as in issues of method and evidence in early Heidegger and psychoanalysis (from Freud to Lacan). In the recent past he taught undergraduate courses on Freud and Kierkegaard and a graduate course on Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Carl F. Cranor (Ph.D., UCLA; M.S.L., Yale Law School). His generic research interests are in legal and moral philosophy. More specifically in recent years he has focused on philosophic issues concerning risks, science and the law, writing on the regulation of carcinogens and developmental toxicants, the use of scientific evidence in legal decisions, the idea of acceptable risks, protection of susceptible populations, and how society might approach the regulation of new technologies and toxicants. He is the author of Regulating Toxic Substances: A Philosophy of Science and the Law (1993) and Toxic Torts: Science, Law and the Possibility of Justice (2006), as well as co-authoring a report for the Office of Technology Assessment, Identifying and Regulating Carcinogens (1987), and a study by an Institute of Medicine Committee, Valuing Health: Cost Effectiveness Analysis for Regulation (2006). This research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the University of California Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program. At the undergraduate level he has taught courses on ethics, political philosophy, law and society, legal philosophy, environmental ethics, Rawls, justice and utilitarianism and a rare course in the history of philosophy. At the graduate level seminars have included justice, Rawls, Rawls and utilitarianism, philosophy of the tort law, legal philosophy, and the idea of acceptable risks. He has served on science advisory panels (California’s Proposition 65 Panel and its Electric and Magnetic Fields Panel) as well as on Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences Committees.

John Martin Fischer (Ph.D., Cornell University) is the Chair of the Philosophy Department. His main research interests lie in free will, moral responsibility, and both metaphysical and ethical issues pertaining to life and death. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control; with Mark Ravizza, Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility; and My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility. Most recently, he has contributed to Four Views on Free Will, in Blackwell’s Great Debates in Philosophy series. His undergraduate teaching includes an introductory ethics course, philosophy of law, theories of distributive justice, and philosophy of religion. He has also taught various courses on death and the meaning of life. His graduate teaching has primarily focussed on free will, moral responsibility, and the metaphysics of death (and the meaning of life).

David Glidden (Ph.D., Princeton University) is currently the Editor of the History of Philosophy Quarterly. He divides his own research interests between the history of philosophy (especially Greco-Roman philosophers) and the spiritual life of philosophy as a practiced way of life. As an historian he has written on a range of figures from Socrates, the Sophists, and the Cynics, to Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, as well as the Hellenistics (Epicureans, Stoics, and skeptics), Middle-Platonists (such as Plutarch), various Roman philosophers, such as Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and beyond. He has taught these figures to undergraduates and graduate students in both Philosophy and Classics. His interest in philosophy as a practiced way of life has connected specifically with the writings of Josiah Royce, American pragmatists from William James to Richard Rorty, as well as the writings and practices of Thich Nhat Hanh’s engaged Buddhism and assorted spiritual figures from Jesus to Rilke and Jung. He has addressed issues raised by such figures in an assortment of courses dealing with the care of the soul, the meaning of life, democracy in America, social philosophy, immigration, nationalism, and the mor(t)ality of war.

Peter Graham (Ph.D., Associate Professor and Undergraduate Advisor) is interested in Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, and Early Modern Philosophy.

Paul Hoffman (Ph.D., Professor) is interested in Early Modern Philosophy, Moral Psychology, and Philosophy of Mind.

Robin Jeshion (Ph.D., Professor and Graduate Advisor) is interested in Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, and History of Analytic Philosophy.

Pierre Keller (Ph.D., Associate Professor) is interested in Kant, 19th Century Philosophy, and Phenomenology.

Coleen Macnamara (Ph.D., Georgetown University). Her research interests lie at the intersection of ethics and moral psychology. She is currently working on developing a theory of holding others responsible, explicating this
activity’s conceptual core, typology, and ethics. In the recent past she taught a graduate course on deontic pluralism and is currently teaching undergraduate courses in bioethics and feminist bioethics.

Michael Nelson (Ph.D., Princeton University) earned his B.A. at Reed College in 1994 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2002. He joined UCR’s philosophy department in 2005, after spending three years at Yale University as an assistant professor and one year at University of Arizona as a visiting assistant professor. His research is primarily in philosophy of language—focusing on propositional attitude reports, pragmatics, and indexicality—and metaphysics—focusing on the metaphysics of time and modality and the nature of particularity. He is also interested in agency theory.

Andrews Reath (Ph.D., Harvard University) works in the area of moral philosophy, in particular Kant’s practical philosophy, with additional interests in the history of moral philosophy. His work on Kant has focused on his moral psychology, his conception of autonomy, and the foundational arguments in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. In 2006 he published a collection of essays on these topics, Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory (Oxford). Current projects include a Kantian account of what it is to set ends through reason, Kant’s account of free agency, an edited collection of new essays on the Critique of Practical Reason, and a short book on the argument of the Groundwork. His seminars and lecture courses in recent years have covered various aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy, contemporary moral theory, practical reason, the history of ethics, and Rawls’s political philosophy.

Erich Reck (Ph.D., University of Chicago). His main research interests lie in the history of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science. More peripheral interests include twentieth-century philosophy more generally, the philosophy of language and mind, and aesthetics. He is the editor, or co-editor, of From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy and of Gottlob Frege: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vols. I–IV (with M. Beaney), as well as the co-translator of Frege’s Lectures on Logic: Carnap’s Student Notes, 1910–1914 (with S. Awodey). In addition, he has published a number of articles on Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, the history and philosophy of logic, and the history and philosophy of mathematics. During recent years he has taught undergraduate classes in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and on the infinite, and graduate seminars on Frege, early and later Wittgenstein, rule following, the notion of sense, and scientific explanation.

Eric Schwitzgebel (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley). Most of his research explores connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind, especially the nature of belief, the inaccuracy of our judgments about our stream of conscious experience, and the tenuous relationship between philosophical ethics and actual moral behavior. He is co-author, with psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt, of Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic (2007). He maintains a secondary interest in classical Chinese philosophy.

Charles Siewert (Ph.D., Professor) is interested in Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and Ancient Philosophy.

Georgia Warnke (Ph.D., Boston University). Her research interests include critical theory, hermeneutics, democratic theory and issues of race, sex and gender. Her latest book is After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Recently she has written articles on Jurgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Clifford Geertz. Recent graduate courses have focused on Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer and issues of identity. Undergraduate courses include courses on political philosophy, feminism and Marxism.

Gary Watson (Ph.D., Princeton University) works in Moral and Political Philosophy, with a special focus on moral psychology and theory of agency. A number of his essays on freedom and responsibility have been collected in his Agency and Answerability (Oxford University Press, 2004). He is also editor of Free Will (second edition, Oxford University Press, 2003). In addition, he has published on contractualism, theory of virtue, promising, and Kant’s ethics, and he maintains an active research and teaching interest in criminal law and in philosophical issues in race and gender. He is an Advisory Editor for the journal, Philosophy and Public Affairs. Professor Watson joined the Philosophy Department in 1999.

Howard Wettstein (Ph.D., City University of New York) is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University Honors Program. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Yeshiva College, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. He has published two books—The Magic Prism: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Has Semantics Rested On a Mistake?, and Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 1991)—and a number of papers in the philosophy of language, for many years the focus of his research. During the last decade he has also worked in the philosophy of religion, publishing papers on topics like awe, doctrine, the problem of evil, and the viability of philosophical theology. He is currently at work on a book in the philosophy of religion. Among his central teaching interests is a freshman level introduction to philosophy, which raises the central questions in the field by way of issues in the philosophy of religion. In recent years he has taught graduate seminars on the meaning of life (with John Fischer) and on Kripke (with Paul Hoffman). He has also taught philosophy of language seminars at UCLA. He is a senior editor (with Peter French) of Midwest Studies in Philosophy, and has edited a number of other volumes including Themes From Kaplan (Oxford University Press, 1989, co-edited) and Diasporas and Exiles (University of California Press, 2002).

Mark A. Wrathall (Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley; J.D., Harvard University). His research focuses on the existential and phenomenological traditions in philosophy. He is particularly interested in phenomenological accounts of perception, language, art, religion, and law. Wrathall is the author of How to Read Heidegger, and has edited several collections of essays, including A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism and Religion after Metaphysics. Recent articles draw on the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Pascal. He has taught courses over the past few years on phenomenology, existentialism, perception, art, and the philosophy of law. Wrathall is currently working on a book-length manuscript on Heidegger’s later work, and editing The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time.

Larry Wright (Ph.D., Indiana University). His research interests lie mainly in Explanation, Evidence, and Argument, though these topics have lately led him into exploring the intersection of the Analytic and Continental traditions. He is the author of Teleological Explanations and three texts on analytical reading. In recent years he has written articles on argument and understanding, the deductive ideal, justification and discovery, the normativity of the notions of function and goal, and the relation between reasoning and explaining. He is currently working on a manuscript tracing the roots of the concept of a reason in agency. During this period he has taught undergraduate courses on early analytic philosophy and on reasoning and graduate seminars on explanation, Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, and the concept of a reason.