Department Chair
Faculty
Lucy Allais Email
Henry E. Allison Endowed Chair in the History of Philosophy
Ph.D. Oxford University, 2001
Office: HSS 8056 Phone: (858) 534-8670
Allais works on Kant’s philosophy, and on topics related to wrongdoing and justice such as forgiveness and punishment. She is also interested in bioethics.
Saba Bazargan Email Web
Associate Professor
Ph.D. Rutgers University, 2009
Office: HSS 8061
Bazargan’s primary interests are in applied ethics and normative ethics. He is currently working on revisionist theories of Just War according to which the moral permissibility of imposing harms in warfare depends on the justness of the war being fought. He also works on theories of individual responsibility for collectively committed harms.
William Bechtel Email Web
Professor
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1977
Office: HSS 8076 Phone: (858) 822-4461
Bechtel conducts research in the history and philosophy of the life sciences (biochemistry, cell and molecular biology, neurobiology, psychology, and cognitive science), with a special emphasis on the strategies of mechanistic explanation employed and the invocation of active (cyclic, autocatalytic) mechanisms to explain how biological systems maintain themselves far from equilibrium.
David O. Brink Email Web
UC Distringuished Professor
Ph.D. Cornell University, 1985
Office: HSS 8016 Phone: (858) 534-4881
Brink’s research interests are in ethical theory, history of ethics, and jurisprudence. Within ethics, he is especially interested in historical and systematic perspectives on practical reason, moral demands, and the normativity of ethics. Within jurisprudence, he is especially interested in issues in analytical jurisprudence about the nature of law and legal interpretation and in substantive areas of constitutional and criminal jurisprudence.
Nancy Cartwright Email Web
UC Distringuished Professor
Ph.D. University of Illinois, 1971
Office: HSS 7023 Phone: (858) 793-1979
Cartwright conducts research in the philosophy of the natural, social and policy sciences where she has specialized in physics and economics. She is working now on questions of causality, objectivity in science, and evidence, especially for evidence-based policy.
Jonathan Cohen Email Web
Professor
Ph.D. Rutgers University, 2000
Office: HSS 8072 Phone: (858) 534-6812
Cohen works and teaches on topics in philosophy of mind, language, and perception, particularly as these are informed by the cognitive sciences. Much of his work in recent years has concerned color and color vision.
Gerald Doppelt Email Web
Professor
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1969
Office: HSS 7013 Phone: (858) 534-2933
Doppelt's current research falls into two main areas: Philosophy of Science - in particular topics such as Thomas Kuhn, scientific change and progress, scientific realism, scientific rationality, the place of values in scientific inquiry, the role of standards of evidence in scientific change – and Political Philosophy, including theory of justice, Rawls work, political liberalism, multiculturalism, the role of self-respect in political theory, communitarianism, and issues of gender and race.
Matthew Fulkerson Email Web
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2010
Office: HSS 8073 Phone: (858) 534-6643
Fulkerson's work is primarily in the areas of Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Much of his work relates to philosophical issues that arise from the investigation of human haptic touch. More recently, he's been working on multisensory experience, spatial representation, the affective character of perception, and the relationship between perception and bodily awareness.
Rick Grush Email Web
Professor
Ph.D. University of California, San Diego, 1995
Office: HSS 7038 Phone: (858) 822-4440
Grush’s work is primarily in theoretical cognitive neuroscience and the metaphysics of mind and representation. He has significant interests in linguistics and early modern. Recently he has focused on the emulation theory of representation, and spatial and temporal representation. These topics and others will be treated in more detail in The Machinery of Mindedness, his in-progress book.
Monte Johnson Email Web
Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2003
Office: HSS 7054 Phone: (858) 822-4515
Johnson teaches classical and hellenistic philosophy. His research focuses on Aristotle and Democritus, and their immense subsequent influence on philosophy and science. He is currently working on a reconstruction of Aristotle's lost work the Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy).
Kerry McKenzie Email Web
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Leeds, England, 2012
Office: HSS 8088 Phone (858) 534-2566
McKenzie's research focuses on topics in the metaphysics of science, especially modality, fundamentality, structuralism, naturalism, and realism.
Donald Rutherford Email Web
Professor
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1988
Office: HSS 7010 Phone: (858) 822-1655
Rutherford works mainly on early modern philosophy and on the reception of ancient philosophy in the early modern period. Other areas of interest are Kant's critical philosophy and its development, and Nietzsche.
Clinton Tolley Email Web
Associate Professor
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2007
Office: HSS 8018 Phone: (858) 822-2686
Tolley works primarily on the history of modern European philosophy, focusing on Kant, early analytic philosophy (especially Bolzano and Frege), and phenomenology (especially Brentano, Husserl, and the early Heidegger). Tolley's main interests in this period lie on the side of theoretical philosophy and, in particular, in the philosophy of logic, theories of concepts, semantics, and ontology.
Eric Watkins Email Web
Professor
Ph.D. University of Notre Dame, 1994
Office: HSS 8062 Phone: (858) 822-0082
Watkins’ research focuses on Kant's theoretical philosophy and its place within modern philosophy and science. He is also interested in early modern philosophy (esp. Leibniz), German Idealism and the history of philosophy of science.
Emeriti Faculty
Henry E. Allison Email
Allison's areas of specialization include Kant, Spinoza, German Idealism, and eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophy. He was a philosophy professor at UCSD from 1973-94, department chair from 1978-1982 and a research professor from 1995-97. His latest publications include a revised and enlarged edition of Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (2004) and Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise (2008).
Patricia Churchland Email Web
B.Phil. Oxford University, 1969
Office: HSS 8012 Phone: (858) 534-6811
Pat Churchland focuses on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy. She explores the impact of neuroscientific developments on our understanding of consciousness, the self, free will, decision making, ethics, learning, and religion. She joined the department in 1984 and served as chair from 2000-07.
Paul Churchland Email Web
Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 1969
Office: HSS 8012 Phone: (858) 534-6811
Paul Churchland's research is in the philosophy of science (neurosciences, physics, astronomy); philosophy of mind (psychology); epistemology (cognitive science, artificial intelligence); philosophy of language; and the history of philosophy. He joined the department in 1984 and served as chair from 1986-90.
Edward Lee Email
Ph.D. Princeton University
Lee taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1961 to 1968, then at the University of Texas at Austin from 1969 to 1971, and finally here at UCSD from 1971 to 1996. He served as chair of the department from 1976-78. Since leaving UCSD, Ed has enjoyed being retired and working on a book about Plato's Symposium.