• HOME
• ABOUT US
• PEOPLE
  • Faculty
  • Graduate Students
  • Staff
• EVENTS
  • Colloquia
  • Conferences
  • Workshops, Etc.
• GRADUATE PROGRAM
  • About the Program
  • Placement
  • Student Professional Successes
• UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM
• COURSES
  • Department Courses
  • Course Renumbering
• NEWS
  • 2013
  • 2012
  • 2011
  • 2010
  • 2009
  • 2008
  • 2007
  • 2006
• AWARDS
• FORMS
• EMPLOYMENT

UCR Faculty

Maudemarie Clark (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) Professor Clark joins UCR from Colgate University where she served as George Carleton Jr. Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy. Before joining Colgate, she taught for ten years in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. Specializing in 19th century German philosophy, her main focus has been on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Among her many publications on Nietzsche are Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy and a co-translation, with Alan Swensen, of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality . She is currently finishing a co-authored book entitled Nietzsche's Magnificent Tension of the Spirit, on Nietzsche's philosophical psychology and why he writes the way he does.

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's (Ph.D., Cornell University) 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) 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 J. Graham (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Professor and the CHASS Associate Dean of Student Academic Affairs. He is interested in Epistemology and Philosophy of Language and Mind.

Agnieszka Jaworska (Ph.D., Harvard University) Associate Professor Jaworska comes to UCR from Stanford University, where she taught courses on Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, and Medical Ethics, and was part of the Program in Ethics in Society. Earlier she worked in the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Her current project, entitled "Ethical Dilemmas at the Margins of Agency," concerns the ethics of treatment of individuals whose status as persons is thought to be compromised or uncertain, such as Alzheimer's patients, addicts, psychopaths, and young children. It is part of a larger project on the nature of value and the moral psychology of valuing. Professor Jaworska's recent research has been published in journals including Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Ethics .

Pierre Keller (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an Associate Professor. He is interested in Kant, 19^th 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.

Jozef Müller (Ph.D. Princeton University) works in ancient philosophy, having earned his PhD at Princeton University. His primary interest in ancient philosophy is Aristotle, with particular emphasis on Aristotle's ethics and theory of action. He also maintains active research interests in Plato, Hellenistic Philosophy, and Neoplatonism. He is currently working on various research projects, including a book on Aristotle's moral psychology, a translation and commentary of Aristotle's treatment of pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics, and various articles. Among his other teaching and research interests are history of ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of action.

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.

John Perry (Ph.D., Cornell University) received his B.A. in Philosophy from Doane College and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1968. He was a member of the Philosophy Department at UCLA from 1968 to 1974, and since 1974 has been at Stanford University, where he is the Henry Walgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy. Professor Perry comes to Riverside half time, in conjunction with his phased retirement from Stanford. Professor Perry has published several books and many articles on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. He received a Jean Nicod Prize (France), a Humboldt Prize (Germany), and a Guggenheim Fellowship. At Stanford he served as the Chair of the Philosophy Department for many years, and also as Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, which he helped to found in 1983. He is co-host of the radio program "Philosophy Talk."

Andrews Reath (Ph.D., Harvard University) is a Professor of Philosophy and the department Chair for the 2012-2013 academic year. He 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). He has also co-edited (with Jens Timmermann) a collection of new essays on the Critique of Practical Reason—Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason: A Critical Guide (Cambridge 2010). 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., UC 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.

Howard Wettstein (Ph.D., City University of New York) has written 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 (PDF; 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 an additional focus has been the philosophy of religion; he has published on topics like religious experience, awe, the problem of evil, and the viability of philosophical theology. He is currently at work on a book in the philosophy of religion. He is an Editor 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., UC Berkeley; J.D., Harvard University) is the Graduate Advisor. 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.