UCR Graduate Students
Stephanie Allen (B.A, Bard College; M.A., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) is a first-year student interested in truth, metaphilosophy and William James.
Zachary Bachman (B.A., UCSD; M.A., Texas A&M) has research interests in action theory, ethics, and moral psychology. He is particularly interested in free will and moral responsibility, practical reasoning, and moral realism.
David Beglin (B.A., University of Rhode Island) is a first-year student interested in free will, ethics, and phenomenology.
Joe Cressotti (B.A., Yale; M. Phil., University of Glasgow) is working on Kant and aesthetic judgment. He is also interested in Hegel, Wittgenstein, and the history of early modern philosophy.
Daniel Ehrlich (B.A., UC Santa Cruz; M.A., San Jose State University) is interested in 19th and 20th century continental philosophy.
Kevin Gin (B.A., Messiah College; M.A., Northern Illinois University) is interested in the history of philosophy and phenomenology. He is also interested in logic, theories of truth, and the philosophy of language and logic.
Jason Gray (B.A., University of Alabama; M.A., Georgia State University) is interested in Agency Theory, Ethics, and Philosophy of Mind.
Jorgen Hansen (B.A., Utah Valley University) is primarily interested in free will and moral psychology, especially from the approaches of experimental philosophy and cognitive science. He is also interested in metaphysics, philosophy of psychology, and animal ethics.
Rebecca Harrison (B.A., New School, NY; M.A., Georgia State University), a first year student, focuses on post-Kantian German philosophy.
Heinrik Hellwig (B.A. John Carroll University; M.A. Texas A&M University) is interested in Philosophy of Law. His main research interest is Causation in the Law. More peripheral interests include general jurisprudence, tort law, and human rights. In his dissertation, he is undertaking to explore the numerous different doctrines of causation of the general part of criminal law and to explicate which of such doctrines accurately captures the causal requirement for liability that courts are actually applying in criminal cases.
Mark Johnson (B.A., Gordon College; M.A., Yale Divinity School).
Daisy Laforce (B.Sc., Universiyy of Ottawa; M.A., Simon Fraser University) is a first-year student primarily interested in the philosophy of the humanities and Nietzsche.
Emily Llenicka (B.A., Union College) is a first-year student interested in action theory and epistemology.
Patrick Londen (B.A. Columbia University) is interested in phenomenology, and philosophy of psychology.
Samantha Matherne (B.A. and M.A. [Religious Studies], University of Pennsylvania) is interested in European Philosophy of the 18th-20th centuries, especially Kant and Phenomenology. She is also interested in the philosophy of perception and aesthetics. In her dissertation, she is exploring the interconnections between Kant's doctrine of Schematism, the Critique of Judgment, and the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty.
Meredith McFadden Meredith McFadden (B.A., Beloit College, M.A., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) is interested in Philosophy of Action and Moral Psychology. In particular, she enjoys working on the normativity involved in practical reasoning and the relation between this normativity, metaethics, and the human sciences.
Chris McVey (B.A., University of Washington) is primarily interested in ethics. Specifically, he is interested in how it is we come to be moral, and conversely why it is so many of us lose our moral way. In service to these larger questions, Chris enjoys studying habituation, our practices of praise and blame, and ancient philosophy.
Luis Montes (B.A., Azusa Pacific University, M.A., UC Riverside) is currently focusing on topics in philosophy of action, practical reason, theories of reason and of motivation, and meta-ethics. He's also interested in philosophy of religion and in continental philosophy, especially Heidegger.
Courtney Morris (B.A. [Philosophy and English], University of Utah; M.A. [English], SUNY at Buffalo; M.A. [Philosophy], University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) is interested in History of Philosophy, Kant, Hegel, and Philosophy of Language.
Maxwell Murphey (M.A., UCR; B.A., Columbia University) is working on the metaphysics and epistemology of activity, agency, and spirit in Kant and Hegel. He is also interested in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of biology, ancient philosophy, phenomenology, modality, meta-ethics, and the analytic-continental divide.
Jonah Nagashima (B.A., Biola University; M.A., Northern Illinois University) is a second year graduate student.
Christian Pillsbury (B.A., New College, Florida) is interested in continental and analytic philosophy and epistemology.
John Ramsey (B.A., Ursinus College; M.A., UC Riverside) is currently writing a dissertation in which he investigates oppressive speech and defends the Constitutes Thesis, the view that our words do not merely cause the harms of oppression, but are in and of themselves acts of oppression. His main interests in philosophy are twofold. The first is the interplay between philosophy of language and social philosophy, and the second is Classical Chinese Philosophy, specifically Confucian role ethics and moral development as well as knowledge and craft in the Zhuangzi.
Patrick Ryan (B.A., University of New Hampshire; MA UC Riverside) works on Kant and Post-Kantian European Philosophy and moral psychology. He is particularly interested in Bergson, Cassirer, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Patrick plans to defend a holistic functional account of mind in his dissertation. Patrick thinks that consideration of mathematical practice and psychopathology lead one to such a view of the mind. Thus, his research is informed by the development of mathematics and the development of brain science. Patrick is also interested in the ethical and legal treatment of those deemed mentally ill.
Avery Snelson (B.A., Drury University; M.A., University of British Columbia), a first year student, has a wide range of interests that include Nietzsche, the philosophy of religion, the history of late modern philosophy, existentialism and epistemology.
Megan Henricks Stotts (B.A., Denison University; M.A., UC Riverside) is primarily interested in philosophy of language. Specifically, she works on theories of reference, the semantic/pragmatic distinction, and theories of linguistic conventions. She is also interested in logic and ethics, including metaethics and history of ethics.
Will Swanson (B.A. [Philosophy and English], Pomona College) is interested in the history of modern philosophy after Kant (especially Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger).
Philip Swenson (B.S. [History], Central Missouri University; M.A., University of Missouri, Columbia).
Yvonne Tam (B.A., Colgate University; M.A., University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) is interested in the structure of normativity, especially in connection to metaethics, agency theory, practical reason, moral emotions, and epistemology. She especially enjoys consulting the likes of Kant, Frege, and Nietzsche on these issues.
Eric Dane Walker (B.S., B.A., Montana State University; M.A., University of Montana). Eric is
trying to understand both the ontological and the deontological conditions for the possibility
of logic, mathematics, and natural science, and how each sort of condition relates to the other.
Approaching this topic historically, he studies those philosophers who themselves have worked
to understand such things, philosophers such as Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, as
well as other late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European thinkers.
Justin White (B.A., [Philosophy and English], Brigham Young University) is primarily interested in 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology and hermeneutics. He is also interested in philosophy of language, metaphysics, literature, and religion.
Monique Wonderly (B.A., University of Michigan; M.A., Western Michigan University) is primarily interested in Theoretical Ethics, including normative ethics, metaethics, and moral epistemology; Philosophy of Action, especially moral responsibility; and Moral Psychology. She also has a strong secondary interest in Applied Philosophy, including practical ethics, philosophy for children and philosophy of education.