FACT SHEET

Contact Information

US Mailing Address:
Department of Philosophy
Building 90
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2155

Physical location:
Buildings 90 and 100 in the Quad
Main offices are in Building 90

Phone (650) 723-2547
Fax (650) 723-0985

Department Chair: Helen Longino
Department Administrator: Eve Scott

Admissions

Graduate Admissions
Deadlines:
TBA (PhD)
TBA (coterm)
TBA (MA)
Detailed Information


Undergraduate Admissions
Applications are handled centrally
by Stanford University's
Office of Undergraduate Admissions

More information about us

 

Upcoming Events

Josiah Ober: 'Herodous and Rational Cooperation', Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern: Maria Sutton Weeks Research Workshop
Date:  November 6, 2009 3:00 pm
Location: Building 90, Room 92Q, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

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Fernando Ferreira, 'Mathematical Logic as a Foundational Enterprise', Stanford Philosophy Colloquium
Date:  November 13, 2009 3:15 pm
Location: Building 90, Room 92Q, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

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Debra Satz: Title TBA, Princeton University
Date:  November 19, 2009 4:30 pm
Location: Princeton University Center for Human Values, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA

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Julia Annas: 'Virtue and Law in Plato's Republic', Ethics and Politics, Ancient and Modern: Maria Sutton Weeks Research Workshop
Date:  November 19, 2009 5:15 pm
Location: Building 90, Room 92Q, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

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Julia Annas: 'The Unity of Virtue', Stanford Philosophy Colloquium
Date:  November 20, 2009 3:15 pm
Location: Building 90, Room 92Q, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

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Latest News

Professor Emeritus Julius Moravcsik dies at 78
The Department of Philosophy is saddened by the death of long-time teacher, friend, and colleague, Julius Moravcsik on June 3, 2009. Professor Moravcsik joined the Stanford faculty in 1968. He was a scholar of international stature, a leader in scholarship in classical Greek philosophy as well as a systematic philosopher of language and mind and of ethics and aesthetics. He chaired the Stanford Department from 1972 to 1975 and again from 1983 to 1986, and retired in 2007. At the time of his death Professor Moravcsik was a Professor Emeritus. A memorial will be held at noon on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at the Stanford Faculty Club. Read the October 1, 2009 Stanford Report article about Professor Moravcsik.
Congratulations to the 2009 Philosophy Department Graduates
On Sunday, June 14th, Stanford University was pleased to graduate the class of 2009.  We'd like to wish all of our graduates good luck in their future paths! BACHELORS Adrain Alberto Anzualda Jillian Hanson Campbell Alex Suda Coley Kari Miguelle Crawley Shana Jane Daloria Connie Lee Dang Bernard Charles Funk Hugh Conor Gorman Victoria Yin-Wai Ha Adam Jared Hepworth Esther Eunjin Kang Christine Kim Cole Edward Leahy Lindell Eugene Lucy Katherine Helena Meadows Darren Darnell Moore Michael J. Petrin Samuel Roberge Brian James Scoles Daniel David Slate Philip Nathan Spitzer Michael John Wernecke Katharine Cooper Wulff Aaron Ninsei Zagory Yan Zhang MASTERS Osprey Hunter Brown Navid Hassanpour Ava Leigh Liberman DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jesse Adam Alama Lauren Carlton Hartzell Tomohiro Hoshi Sarah Katherine Paul Sarah Simone Richardson  
Professor Friedman Awarded the Humboldt Research Award
Michael Friedman has been awarded the Humboldt Research Award by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  These awards honour the academic achievements to date of internationally recognized scientists and scholars from abroad.  A not insignificant number of award winners have subsequently been granted a Nobel Prize.  The award winners are invited to spend time for research in Germany.  Professor Friedman is planning to spend the academic year 2010-11 in Germany, partly in Berlin at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and partly at the University of Bielefeld at the Center for Science in the Context of Applications.
Kenneth Taylor to be Director of Symbolic Systems.
Effective September 1st, 2009, Kenneth Taylor, professor of Philosophy, will become the director of the Symbolic Systems Program here at Stanford.  Congratulations Ken!
Woods Return to Stanford
The Philosophy Department is happy to announce that Allen Wood and Rega Wood will be returning to Stanford in Fall of 2009.  Welcome back Allen and Rega!
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Overview

Below you will find a full listing of our faculty. This listing is meant to provide you with an overview of the research interests of our faculty. If you click on the link below for "Graduate Students", you will find a similar overview of the research interests of all of our graduate students.

For our official directories, please visit our People section. Our official directories provide more detailed contact information, office locations and office hours, and the ability to search for individuals.

Faculty

  • lanier@stanford.edu

    R. Lanier Anderson

    Associate Professor; Co-Director, Stanford Humanities Fellows Program

    AOS: History of Late Modern Philosophy (18th-20th c.); Kant; Nietzsche; Montaigne; Philosophy and Literature

    Research Interests

    I work in the history of late modern philosophy, focusing primarily on Kant and his influence on 19th c. philosophy.  I have written articles on Kant's theoretical philosophy, on Nietzsche, and on the neo-Kantian movement.  I am currently working on a book about the analytic/synthetic distinction in Kant, as well as ongoing projects about the notion of redemption and the norms governing belief for Nietzsche.  With Joshua Landy (French), I have been instrumental in developing and undergraduate program in Philosophy and Literature at Stanford, and we are currently collaborating on papers in that area.

  • johan@csli.stanford.edu

    Johan van Benthem

    Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor

    AOS: Pure and applied logic

    Research Interests

    General logic, in particular, logical model theory and modal logic
    (correspondence theory, temporal logic, dynamic, epistemic logic).

    Applications of logic to philosophy (epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language), linguistics, computer science
    and cognitive science (generalized quantifiers, categorial grammar, process logics, information update, logic and games).
     

  • bobonich@stanford.edu

    Christopher Bobonich

    Professor

    AOS: n/a

    Research Interests

    n/a

  • bratman@stanford.edu

    Michael E. Bratman

    U. G. and Abbie Birch Durfee Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor of Philosophy

    AOS: Philosophy of Action; Practical Reason; Shared Agency

    Research Interests

    I am currently at work on a monograph on shared agency, and on a series of essays on practical rationality. I also continue to develop an approach to self-governance presented in my Structures of Agency (2007).  All three projects are efforts to develop further the planning theory of intention and our agency. The planning theory tries to shed light on the temporally  extended structure of our agency; and the idea that underlies much of my work is that this approach to individual human agency puts us in a position to deepen our understanding of a wide range of issues in practical philosophy.

  • agb@stanford.edu

    Alexis Burgess

    Assistant Professor

    AOS: Metaphysics, Language, Logic

    Research Interests

    I work mainly on issues at the intersection of metaphysics and language, especially those surrounding logical paradoxes—or, more generally, those whose treatment seems to benefit from the use of tools native to so-called philosophical logic.  Of course, it's hard to do philosophy of language without doing some philosophy of mental representation too.  On the other hand, I seem to be managing with metaphysics sans epistemology!

  • jcohen57@stanford.edu

    Joshua Cohen

    Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society

    AOS: Political Philosophy

    Research Interests

    n/a

  • crimmins@stanford.edu

    Mark Crimmins

    Associate Professor

    AOS: Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics

    Research Interests

    I am interested in language, mind, and reality: semantic accounts  of natural languages including puzzling phenomena such as vagueness and attitude ascription, theories of consciousness, representation and propositional attitudes, and explanations of ontological commitment and its connection to existence.

  • graciela@stanford.edu

    Graciela De Pierris

    Associate Professor of Philosophy

    AOS: Epistemology; Skepticism and Naturalism

    Research Interests

    Historical Topics in Epistemology, especially Hume and Kant; also Frege, Wittgenstein, and Quine; skepticism and naturalism

  • sf@csli.stanford.edu

    Solomon Feferman

    Patrick Suppes Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences, Em.

    AOS: Mathematical Logic; Foundations of Mathematics; Philosophy of Mathematics; History of Modern Logic

    Research Interests

    n/a

  • dagfinn@csli.stanford.edu

    Dagfinn Follesdal

    C.I. Lewis Professor of Philosophy

    AOS: Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mathematics, 20th Century Philosophy, mainly Husserl, the existentialists and Quine

    Research Interests

    I am now working on Husserl and Gödel’s views on the existence and knowability of mathematical entities., supported by the Templeton Foundation. 

  • mlfriedman@stanford.edu

    Michael Friedman

    Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities

    AOS: Kant; Philosophy of Science, History of 20th Century Philosophy

    Research Interests

    My interests include: Kant, Philosophy of Science, History of Twentieth Century Philosophy, including the interaction between philosophy and the exact sciences from Kant through the logical empiricists, prospects for post-Kuhnian philosophy of science in light of these developments, and the relationship between analytic and continental traditions in the early twentieth century

  • dhills@stanford.edu

    David Hills

    Associate Professor (Teaching)

    AOS: Aesthetics; History of Modern Philosophy; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Mind; Theory of Knowledge; Continental Philosophy; Political Philosophy; Ethics

    Research Interests

    Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers. Historians of philosophy accordingly divide into those who are forever asking "Where is he coming from?" and those who are forever asking "Where does he get off?" You can probably already guess which kind of historian I am.

    Currently I am hardest at work on a booklength study of metaphor. A metaphor leads two lives. It is a short-lived bit of imaginative free play put to durable serious expressive use.

    In the short term, a metaphor invites its audience to play a pickup game of make believe with the speaker. A game of make believe, since what players are to imagine in it is a fixed function of perceivable states of various props and perceivable actions on the part of various actors, the function in question being specified by rules that all concerned undertake to play by. A pickup game, since it proceeds without benefit of explicit or tacit agreements among the players: each player identifies the game she is invited to play by reinventing it on the spot, endeavoring for her part to play by whatever rules promise to afford her personally the greatest imaginative satisfaction.

    In the longer term, a metaphor presents its audience with a particular thought content by embodying that content in a word or phrase or sentence the speaker proceeds to weave into larger verbal structures. The word or phrase or sentence in question functions in these larger structures as if it had been endowed with that content once and for all by an appropriate standing literal meaning.

    We need to work out how the content a metaphor durably embodies depends on the unstated rules of the evanescent game of make believe it invites us to play when first we hear it.

  • thoshi@stanford.edu

    Tomohiro Hoshi

    Social Science Research Asst

    AOS: Logic; Formal Epistemology

    Research Interests

    n/a

  • Nadeem.Hussain@stanford.edu

    Nadeem J. Z. Hussain

    Associate Professor

    AOS: Metaethics; Philosophy of Action; Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy

    Research Interests

    I specialise in metaethics, the philosophy of action, and the history of nineteenth-century German philosophy. I am currently investigating contemporary criticisms of mainstream analytical metaethics and philosophy of action that draw their inspiration from the Kantian tradition. My hope is that a book will emerge from this. Meanwhile I continue to work on assessing different interpretations of Nietzsche views about metaethics and the nature of agency.

  • krista.lawlor@stanford.edu

    Krista Lawlor

    Associate Professor

    AOS: Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology

    Research Interests

    In philosophy of mind, I work on issues about coreference and confusion. In epistemology, I work on a variety of issues including the semantics of knowledge ascription, self-knowledge, memory and inference. (Click here for more.)

     

     

  • hlongino@stanford.edu

    Helen Longino

    Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy

    AOS: Philosophy of Science; Philosophy of Biology; Social Epistemology; Feminist Philosophy

    Research Interests

    I am currently completing a monograph analyzing the evidential structures and frameworks of inquiry of contemporary scientific approaches to the study of human behavior.

  • gmints@stanford.edu

    Grigori Mints

    Professor

    AOS: logic, foundations, constructive mathematics

    Research Interests

    mathematical logic, especially proof theory, substitution method, dynamical topological logic, constructive mathematics, foundations

  • JOHN@turing.stanford.edu

    John Perry

    Professor Emeritus, Recalled

    AOS: Philosophy of Languge, Philosophy of Mind

    Research Interests

    I am working on three books:

    Wretched Subterfuge, a defense of compatibilism on the free-will problem.

    With Kepa Korta, a book on the pragmatics of singular reference.

    Meaning and the Self, which concerns personal identity, the self, and self-knowledge.

    I am also finishing the second edition of my book on the philosophy of language, Reference and Reflexivity.

     

     

  • reich@stanford.edu

    Rob Reich

    Associate Professor

    AOS: Political philosophy, Ethics

    Research Interests

    Main interests are in contemporary political theory. Currently working on two book projects, the first on the ideals of equality and adequacy as applied to education policy and reform, the second about topics in ethics, public policy, and philanthropy.

     

    • Author of Bridging Liberalism and Multiculturalism in American Education (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
    • Co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It (Brookings Institution Press, 2005).
    • Co-editor (with Debra Satz) of Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (Oxford University Press, 2009).

  • tryckman@stanford.edu

    Thomas Ryckman

    Lecturer

    AOS: Philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, history of 20th century physics and philosophy

    Research Interests

    The so-called 'pre-established harmony' between mathematics and nature; the cognitive meaning of symmetry and invariance principles.

  • dsatz@stanford.edu

    Debra Satz

    Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society

    AOS: Political Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Social Science

    Research Interests

    I am currently working on two main projects.  The first project concerns the basis for and nature of the state's obligation to provide an education to its citizens.  

    The second project is related to my forthcoming book, The Moral Limits of the Market [forthcoming, OUP, 2009]. It concerns the relationship between markets and social altruism.

    I also have continuing interests in global justice.

  • schapiro@stanford.edu

    Tamar Schapiro

    Associate Professor

    AOS: Ethics; History of Ethics; Kant's Practical Philosophy; Practical Reasoning; Moral Psychology; Philosophy of Action

    Research Interests

    The nature of passion/inclination and its role in practical reasoning; the structure of agency; the role of ideal concepts in moral theory; Kantian nonideal theory

  • ktaylor@stanford.edu

    Kenneth Taylor

    Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy

    AOS: Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics, Normativity

    Research Interests

     I am currently working on three books, in various stages of completion.  The most nearly complete is a book about reference called Referring to the World:  An Opinionated Introduction to the Theory of Reference.  It was commissioned by Oxford ages ago and should be finished soon -- any day now.   The second book, which is a longer term project is called Toward a Natural History of Normativity.  It contains a naturalization of many things normative -- including ethical norms, linguistic norms, epistemic norms, and logical norms.   The third book, which is still a bit of a gleam in my eyes,  will be called Pragmatics Everywhere.  It grows out of my most recent work on the pragmatics of communication -- about which I have written a fair amount, but in somewhat scattered and occasional form.   This book will collect my thoughts on pragmatics under one heading. 

  • joelv@stanford.edu

    Joel Velasco

    n/a

    AOS: Philosophy of Biology; general philosophy of science

    Research Interests

    My areas of specialization are the Philosophy of Biology as well as more general Philosophy of Science

  • WASOW@stanford.edu

    Tom Wasow

    Clarence Irving Lewis Professor

    AOS: Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Philosophy of Linguistics

    Research Interests

    Much of my research is concerned with the question of what leads people to formulate a sentence one way, when there is another way of saying the same thing.  In particular, I have investigated alternative word orders allowable in English and the use of the word that where it is optional, making use of annotated corpora of speech and writing.  This has led me to some general conclusions about language production strategies that facilitate communicative efficiency.

    Another project is an assessment of the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics.  After more than fifty years of work within the generative tradition, what are its accomplishments and shortcomings?

  • allen.wood@stanford.edu

    Allen Wood

    Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor

    AOS: Modern Philosophy, esp. Kant and German Idealism, Ethics

    Research Interests

    History of modern philosophy, especially Kant and German idealism, and chiefly in the areas of ethics and social and political philosophy.