Visiting Scholars
Valentin Beck is a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin (2012-). He was previously a doctoral fellow at the Goethe University Frankfurt (2009-12) and the University of Bremen (2008-9) and a visiting scholar at the ANU in Canberra (2011). His research is in political and moral philosophy and economic ethics. In his monograph, Eine Theorie der globalen Verantwortung [A Theory of Global Responsibility; Suhrkamp 2016], he develops an approach to moral and political responsibilities of individuals and collectives in the global realm, especially as regards global poverty. More recently, he has written and published on issues in consumer ethics and the ethics of boycotting.
Lizhen Duan I received my B.A. and Ph.D. from Nanjing University. I majored in western philosophy, especially modern philosophy, German idealism, Neo-pragmatism and Phenomenology. In recent years, I am interested in Kant and contemporary epistemology, especially focus on the relationship between Kantian philosophy and the debate about whether Kant is a conceptualist or not. I try to revisit and reconstruct Kant’s epistemology from the perspective of contemporary analytic philosophy.
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 (BA Columbia , PhD Princeton) has taught principally at Michigan, Arizona, and Rutgers, where he is Board of Governors and Distinguished Professor. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and former president of the APA and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. His primary fields of research include epistemology, social epistemology, action theory, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and, more recently, political and legal philosophy. He has won APA awards for research in 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.
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.
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 (Oxford University Press, 2018), she explores how moral theories should accommodate the errors, ignorance, and misunderstandings that impede us as moral decision makers. Her current projects propose new strategies for (1) weighing stringency of deontological duties, and (2) identifying an agent’s alternatives in the context of moral theories.
Corjin van Mazijk received his Ph.D. in philosophy from KU Leuven and University of Groningen in 2017. He currently works as assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of the History of Philosophy at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. His other previous or current affiliations include Copenhagen University, KU Leuven, Boston University, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and UC Berkeley. His areas of interest include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, naturalization of consciousness, Kant and post-kantian philosophy, and continental philosophy.
Kaspar Villadsen is a visiting scholar at The Department of Philosophy, UC-Berkeley. Villadsen is a Professor at Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School. He is doing research on the concept of the state and civil society in Michel Foucault’s authorship which was published in the book ‘Statephobia and Civil Society: The Political Legacy of Michel Foucault’, 2016, Stanford University Press (with Mitchell Dean). He is also the author of Power and Welfare: Understanding Citizens’ Encounters with StateWelfare, 2013, Routledge (with NannaMik-Meyer). Villadsen’s work has appeared in journals like Economy and Society; Theory, Culture and Society; Body and Society, and New Political Science.
Zemian Zheng Associate professor of philosophy at the School of Philosophy at Wuhan University, received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011). Then he went to Freie Universität Berlin twice to conduct two independent postdoctoral research projects for two years at Dahlem Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy. Thereafter he returned to work at Wuhan University.
Visiting Student Researchers
Victor Aranda Utrero is a Ph.D. candidate in the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he graduated in Philosophy. He received his MA in Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Salamanca. His doctoral research focuses on the history of logic, the development of metalogic and the completeness of formal systems, but he is also interested on model theory and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Thus, at UC Berkeley he will further in foundations of mathematics and improve his skills in mathematical logic.
Julian Bacharach I completed my B.A. in Music at Oxford in 2008, and subsequently moved into philosophy. I am studying for a Ph.D. at University College, London, under the supervision of Mike Martin and Rory Madden. My research concerns the structure of self-conscious temporal thought and intentional agency. I am also interested in issues in philosophical logic, and my historical interests include Aristotle, Kant, and early analytic philosophy.
Benjamin Brast-McKie I am a D.Phil student reading Philosophy at the University of Oxford. My areas of interest include metaphysics, formal and philosophical logic, and the history of analytic philosophy. I am currently working on a thesis supervised by Tim Williamson on the logic of essence and ground. You can find out more about me on my website.
Romain Büchi is a research assistant and Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Zurich. He works mainly on the history of early 20th century logic, but also on ancient and medieval logic and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. In his thesis, he explores the various uses of alphabetic characters as variables or schematic letters in logic and mathematics.
Jixin Liu 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.
Eduardo Pérez-Navarro is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Philosophy I, University of Granada, Spain. His interest areas are philosophy of language and philosophy of logic. In his Ph.D. thesis, he argues for semantic relativism in several ways, which include showing how it can be applied to belief ascriptions, and also explores the boundaries between relativism and expressivism. You can find out more about him on his website.