Graduate Students

Scott Blomgren  (B.A. Philosophy, UCLA) Scott is currently working on issues in the philosophy of language and computational linguistics.

Luna Cheng  (B.A. Philosophy, CUHK). Luna’s main interests are in philosophy of mind, especially perception, intentionality, and theory of meaning. She is also interested in Buddhist philosophy.

Sarah Cohen  (B.A., Yale College; J.D., The University of Chicago Law School). Sarah’s primary interests are in legal, moral, and political philosophy.

SJ Cowan  My interests are in thinkers like Kant, the German Romantics, and Wittgenstein, as well as in Critical Theory, and Feminist and Black thought. My dissertation—which draws heavily on Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, and Adorno—is (tentatively) titled “The Play of Appearances: Aesthetic Semblance and the Reflective Conception of Art”.

Katie Coyne  (B.A., Yale 2020, M. Phil, University of Cambridge, 2021). Katie is interested in metaphysics and ethics, with a historical focus. Her dissertation is on the relationship between practical and theoretical reason in Kant. She is also interested in Aristotle, Hegel, the Frankfurt school, and Iris Murdoch.

Hannah DeBrine  (B.S. with comprehensive honors, Mathematics and Philosophy, UW Madison). Hannah is interested in epistemology and moral psychology. Her dissertation is about testimony, particularly testimony from friends, experts, and scientific communities. In general, she is interested in the way others’ minds matter to us.

Will Dempsey  (B.A. Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis; M.A. Philosophy, Brandeis University); (Meta)metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, history of philosophy, philosophy of fiction.

Micah Dubreuil  (B.A. Philosophy, Wesleyan University; M.A. Philosophy, San Francisco State University). Micah has many questions about the structure and sources of normativity—primarily in the areas of mind, action, and aesthetics.

Matthew Duvalier  (B.A. Johns Hopkins) Matthew is a student in the Logic Group. He studies mathematical logic.

Virginia Foggo  (B.A. Philosophy, UCLA). Virginia is interested in political philosophy, normative ethics and social epistemology. At the moment, her primary interests lie at the intersection of democratic theory and feminist epistemology.

Emily Fox-Penner  (A.B., Harvard) Emily’s main interests are in political philosophy, philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy.

Lucas Goodman  (B.A., Plan II Honors, UT Austin). His interests are in ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and German Idealism.

Burçe Gümüşlü  (B.A. Philosophy, B.A. Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University; M.A. Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich) Burçe’s interests are in political philosophy, feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, and social epistemology.

Russell Helder  (M.A. with distinction, Philosophy, Georgia State University, 2019; B.A. Classics & B.S.A. Chemistry, UT Austin, 2016). His main area of research is ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle’s ethics and psychology. Russ is also interested in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, particularly Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith.

Anhui Huang  (B.A., Philosophy, Williams College) My main areas of interest are language and epistemology. Recently I have been thinking about certainty and uncertainty reports, and their relation to inquiry. I am also interested in lying, assertion, and truth in fiction.

Fanyi Jiang  (B.A. Philosophy, Peking University, 2024). Fanyi’s main interests are in philosophy of mind and the parts of ethics that intersect with it. She also has interests in philosophy of psychiatry and philosophy of games.

Ryan Kendall  (B.S. Math and Economics, Univ. of Redlands; PhD Economics, UC Irvine; M.A. Bioethics, NYU; BPhil Philosophy, Oxford). Ryan is primarily interested in moral and political philosophy and AI safety. He aims to explore questions in these areas using formal methods from epistemology, decision theory, and social choice theory.

Reid Kurashige  (B.A., Williams College) His main interests are in moral philosophy and the history of philosophy (especially Kant).

Madeleine Levac  (B.A. Hons. with high distinction, University of Toronto). Madeleine’s main interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of language and mind.

Amanda Lopatin  (B.A., Rice University). Amanda is interested in value theory, broadly construed.

Jennifer Marsh  (B.A., M.A., University of Pennsylvania) Jennifer is interested in early modern philosophy, particularly Kant’s theoretical philosophy. She is writing her dissertation on the role of concepts in perception for Kant.

Susanna McGrew  (B.A. Philosophy and Economics, Swarthmore College). Her main interests are in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

Russell McIntosh  (B.S. in Mathematics and Philosophy with Highest Distinction, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Russ is interested in ethics, especially empathy, relationships, aggregation, and animals.

Kaden McMillan  (B.A., University of Notre Dame). Kaden’s main interests are in philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of race. He also has interests in the philosophy of math, the philosophy of science, and the history of non-Western philosophical traditions.

Teague Morris  Teague Morris (B.A. summa cum laude with Highest Honors in Philosophy, Williams College). Teague is interested primarily in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with particular interests in phenomenology, pragmatism, relativism and skepticism.

Milan Mossé  (B.A.H. Philosophy, B.S. Mathematics, M.S. Computer Science; Stanford) I’m mainly interested in logic and moral, social, and political philosophy. Here’s my website.

Christian Nakazawa  (A.B., Dartmouth College) Christian is writing a dissertation on discrimination, with special focus on algorithmic fairness. More generally, his interests include moral and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and moral psychology.

Adrian Ommundsen  (BA, BSc, Oslo; MA, LMU Munich) My main interests are in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and formal epistemology. Some of my more specific research interests are conditionals, questions, varieties of dependence, and causal reasoning.

Patrick Pan  (A.B. Computer Science, Harvard; M.M. Piano Performance, New England Conservatory; B.A. Philosophy, Cambridge). Patrick is primarily interested in ethics—recent focuses include normative reasons, reactive attitudes, and epistemic injustice—with a strong secondary interest in aesthetics. He is also especially interested in philosophical questions concerning digital technology across all subfields of philosophy.

Elijah Parish  (B.A. in Philosophy and Mathematics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2025) Elijah’s primary interests are in ethics; philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE); and moral psychology. In particular, he’s curious about shame and forgiveness, partiality and interpersonal relationships, and non-legal means of social coordination, such as traditions, conventions, and stigma.

Luca Passi  (B.A., Pavia; MPhil, Cambridge)

William Phillips  (M.A. Brandeis) I study issues in metaphysics and the history of modern philosophy, especially concerning the philosophy of space and time. I have other interests in the history and philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind. My dissertation critically explores Spinozistic accounts of metaontology, metaepistemology, thought, and extension.

Pia Schneider  (B.A., German Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 2013; M.A., Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, 2016). Pia is writing her dissertation on Kant’s conception of space as the form of sensibility. Some of her other interests are in visual art, new media, and feminism.

Edward Schwartz  (B.A., UC Berkeley, 2017.) I work at the intersection of philosophy of language and metaethics.

Coleman Solis  (B.A. Philosophy, Pomona College, 2019; Bioethics Fellow, NIH, 2021). I’m mostly interested in ethics, especially in questions about how one might live a meaningful, moral life, and a few topics in bioethics.

Matthew Sosa  (BA, MA Philosophy, Stanford University). I’m interested in philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, practical reason, and history of philosophy.

James Takezoe  (B.A., Philosophy, Politics, & Economics, University of Oxford, 2017; MPhil, Philosophy, University of St Andrews, 2020). I spend much of my time trying to use formal tools to tackle problems in areas of ethics including our duties to help those in need, the right to privacy, population ethics, axiology, animal ethics, equality, and desert.

Jonathan Tanaka  (B.A. Philosophy and Mathematics, Columbia University, 2023). His working interests include the philosophy, foundations, and history of mathematics and computer science, philosophical logic, metametaphysics, metaphilosophy, analytic metaphysics, and and the intersection of mind, metasemantics, and language. However, he tries to be interested in “everything” (in the broadest possible sense of the term).

Warren Thimothe  (B.A. cum laude in Philosophy, Amherst College, 2018) His main interests are in political philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Sarah Vernallis  (B.A.H., Philosophy, Stanford University, 2019). Her dissertation is on empathy, imagination, and art. Her work interacts with epistemology, philosophy of language, and feminist philosophy.

Daniel Villalon  (B.A., philosophy and mathematics, Northwestern University, 2017). I am working on topics in the philosophy of logic and language with a focus on proof-theoretic semantics. I also have strong interests in the metaphysics of truth and the history of analytic philosophy.

Alina Wang  (B.A., Philosophy & Psychology, Smith College, 2019). Philosophy of mind and epistemology. Self-knowledge and emotion.

Tessa Whittle  (B.A. the University of Western Ontario, M.A. in Philosophy Simon Fraser University). Her interests are mainly concentrated in the history of philosophy, particularly the early modern period, and in ethics, particularly concerning questions about partiality, alienation, and the limits of ethical theory.

Megan Wu  (B.A. Highest Honors Philosophy and Mathematics, Swarthmore College, 2023). She studies ethics and moral psychology, both in contemporary and Ancient Greek traditions (especially Plato). In particular, she is interested in moral agency, akrasia, and a variety of ethical phenomena including friendship, normative powers, and the reactive attitudes.

Cindy Xin  (B.A.S., Philosophy and Symbolic Systems, Stanford University, 2024). Cindy is primarily interested in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, particularly in explanation in the mind sciences.

Yao Yu  (B.A. Philosophy, UC San Diego, 2025). Her current interests lie in Kant and philosophy of mind, and their intersection. She also has growing interest in philosophy of language.