Visiting Scholars
Austin Andrews (PhD, UCB, 2017; B.A., high honors with distinction, UCSB, 2009). Austin’s research and teaching focus on the metaphysics and epistemology of perceptual experience.
Alan Fenster I was an undergraduate at Harvard and have a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley. I then left the academic world for the investment business and spent fifteen years managing a hedge fund in San Francisco. I retired eight years ago, in part because of a book I wanted to write on the topic of financial creativity and what that has in common with other kinds of creativity. I’m particularly interested in the possibilities and limits of corporations in creating value.
Alvin Goldman received his BA from Columbia University and his PhD from Princeton University. He has taught for over 15 years at Michigan (Ann Arbor), Arizona (Tucson), and Rutgers (New Brunswick), where he is currently Board of Governors professor. He has served as president of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and is a fellow of the American Association of Arts and Sciences. His primary fields of research are epistemology, social epistemology, action theory, philosophy of mind, cognitive science and its philosophical applications, and, more recently, political philosophy. He has won APA awards for research on legal theory, philosophical naturalism, and social epistemology.
Jair A. Krassuski Associate Professor of Philosophy (Department of Philosophy - Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil). He works in Practical Philosophy, primarily Kantian moral theory and research in Ethics, Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Currently studying ethics and religion with interests on normative approaches.
Richard Lawrence (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley). Richard’s research focuses on philosophy of language and logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics. He is also interested in ancient philosophy and philosophy of science. He completed his Ph.D. in 2017 with a dissertation titled Nominalization, Specification, and Investigation. He is currently a Berkeley Connect Fellow mentoring undergraduates in the department.
João P. Martins Neto is Professor of Law at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil) and State Attorney (PGE/SC, Brazil). He has a master’s and doctorate in law and was Visiting Researcher at Columbia University School of Law (2007-2008). His current research at UC Berkeley seeks to explain the free speech constitutional clause in contemporary democracies starting from the phenomenon of language.
Bengt Molander is Professor of Philosophy at the NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. After philosophy studies in Uppsala and Oxford he has held positions at the Universities in Uppsala and Gothenburg and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz, the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. His main research interest is the kinds of knowledge that is primarily expressed through human actions and practices, not in the form of propositions and theories. Other research interests are the connections between artistic expressions and human learning as well as knowledge conceptions (ideologies) in society.
B. Scot Rousse received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Northwestern University. He works primarily on issues in the theory of human identity and action, exploring the overlap among the traditions of existential phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and the philosophy of action. Rousse has been a DAAD Research Fellow at the University of Frankfurt, a Northwestern University Paris Program in Critical Theory Fellow, and participated in a SIAS/Wissenschaftskolleg Summer Institute on “Action Theory in Philosophy and the Social Sciences.” More information is at academia.edu and Google Scholar.
Holly M. Smith serves as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, following appointments at Tufts University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the University of Arizona. She has published widely on topics in normative ethics, moral decision making, the theory of moral responsibility, and bio-medical ethics. In Making Morality Work, forthcoming from Oxford University Press (UK), she explores how moral theories should accommodate the errors, ignorance, and misunderstandings that impede us as moral decision makers. Her current project proposes a new strategy for weighing the stringency of deontological duties.
David Suarez (Postdoc) received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. His dissertation, Thinking Nature: Towards a Phenomenological Naturalism, developed a methodology and ontology for the study of subjectivity. His current postdoctoral research is on the nature of animality, and is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dave works on problems in philosophy of mind and phenomenology, and has a keen interest in Kant and German Idealism. More information can be found at his personal website.
Hartmut von Sass (Ph.D and Dr.habil., University of Zurich) is Associate Professor for Systematic Theology and Philosophy of Religion as well as Deputy Director of the Collegium Helveticum, an interdisciplinary research institute for advanced studies in Zurich. He is working on two projects right now: a book on the practice and structure of comparison (and the idea of the in-comparable); and a book on a modal conception of hope (and the impossibility of complete hopelessness). Additional information can be found at Collegium Helveticum and academia.edu.
Visiting Student Researchers
Jixin Liu now is a Ph.D. candidate in Peking University (Department of Philosophy). His major is logic, especially modal logic and a recent work of him is on weak aggregative modal logics (WAL). At Berkeley, he will study and try to do some research on possibility semantics. He is also interested in set theory, particularly the axiom of choice.
Penelope Orr is a PhD student at the University of Manchester (UK). For the most part, she is interested in the philosophy of psychology and cognitive science: the aim of her doctoral project is to provide a detailed explanation of the cognitive capacities that ground self-conscious thought. At Berkeley, Penny will be researching spatial perception and the first-person perspective.