UBC Philosophy Research

faculty by research • books by faculty • funded research projects • graduate research

Research by the Graduate Faculty

Scott Anderson B.A. (Indiana), PhD. (Chicago)
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Scott Anderson works in moral, social and political philosophy. His dissertation is on the nature of coercion. He also works on issues around gender and feminism, including prostitution, sexual harassment, and rape. Within moral philosophy, he is interested in neo-Aristotelian thinkers, consequentialism, and action theory. He first publication appears in Ethics.

Paul Bartha B.A. (Toronto), Ph.D (Pittsburgh)
Associate Professor of Philosophy

A specialist in philosophy of science, logic and philosophical logic, Paul Bartha's research interests include the foundations of probability, confirmation, deontic logic, and ancient and early modern metaphysics. He is writing a book on analogical reasoning in the sciences and a set of papers on conditional probability. Publications include "Probability and Symmetry"(Philosophy of Science, 2001) with Richard Johns, "Countable Additivity and the de Finetti Lottery" (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2004), and "Taking Stock of Infinite Value: Pascal's Wager and Relative Utilities" (Synthese, forthcoming).

Roberta Ballarin Laurea (Venice), M.A., Ph.D. (UCLA)
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Roberta Ballarin specializes in philosophy of logic, metaphysics and philosophy of language. Recent examples of work include "Validity and Necessity" in The Journal of Philosophical Logic (2005) and "The Interpretation of Necessity and the Necessity of Interpretation" in The Journal of Philosophy (2004).

John Beatty B.S. (Tulane), Ph.D (Indiana)
Professor of Philosophy

John Beatty specializes in history and philosophy of science, especially the conceptual foundations, methodology, and social-political dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology. He is currently working on two major projects: the distinction between the so-called "historical sciences" (including evolutionary biology) vs the "exact" or "experimental sciences," and the atomic age, cold war, and national security dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Sylvia Berryman B.A. (UBC), M.A. (Oregon), PhD. (Texas)
Associate Professor of Philosophy

Sylvia Berryman works on ancient Greek philosophy, with a special interest in post-Aristotelian philosophy and the interactions between ancient natural philosophy and the early sciences. She has written articles on philosophical responses to ancient theories of optics, medicine, pneumatics, mixture, void, and mechanics. Currently she is working on a book manuscript entitled Mechanical Explanation in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy.

Andrew Irvine B.A. (Saskatchewan), M.A. (Western Ontario), Ph.D. (Sydney)
Professor of Philosophy

A specialist on Bertrand Russell, Andrew Irvine also works on topics in the philosophy of logic and mathematics and in political theory. Edited and authored books include Socrates on Trial (University of Toronto Press, 2008), Mistakes of Reason (with Kent Peacocke, eds., University of Toronto Press, 2006), David Stove's On Enlightenment (Transaction, 2003), Argument (with John Woods and Douglas Walton, Prentice-Hall, 2000), Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments (in 4 volumes, Routledge, 1999), Russell and Analytic Philosophy (with G.A. Wedeking, University of Toronto Press, 1993), Physicalism in Mathematics (Kluwer, 1990), and In the Agora: The Public Face of Canadian Philosophy (with John Russell, University of Toronto Press, 2006).

Dominic McIver Lopes B.A. Hons (McGill), D.Phil. (Oxford)
Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar

Dom Lopes works in philosophy of art and philosophy of mind. He is author of Understanding Pictures (Oxford, 1996) and Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford, 2005). His papers have appeared in such journals as Mind, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, the Monist, and Philosophical Psychology. He is also co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (2000, 2005), Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (2003), Philosophy of Literature (2003), and Blackwell's New Directions in Aesthetics book series.

(Please visit the UBC Aesthetics Group's page for more information about research in aesthetics)

Alan Richardson B.A. (Pennsylvania), M.A. (Pittsburgh); Ph.D. (Illinois at Chicago)
Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar

Alan Richardson specializes in history and philosophy of science in the era from from Kant to the present. He is author of Carnap's Construction of the World (Cambridge, 1997). He is co-editor of Origins of Logical Empiricism (Minnesota, 1996), Logical Empiricism in North America (Minnesota, forthcoming), and the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (forthcoming). He is an advisor in the UBC Science Studies Program.

Paul Russell B.A. (Queen's), M.A. (Edinburgh), Ph.D. (Cambridge)
Professor of Philosophy

Paul Russell works on various problems and issues in the areas of free will and moral responsibility, the history of philosophy (particularly Hume) and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1995) and The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford University Press, 2007/in press). He is currently working on The Limits of Free Will: The Classical and Contemporary Debate (Blackwell, under contract) and is editing, with Peter Millican, David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, "World's Classics).

Steven Savitt A.B. (Columbia), Ph.D. (Brandeis)
Professor of Philosophy

Steven Savitt's areas of specialization include philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology. He has published articles in a wide variety of journals and his edited collection of papers on the direction of time, Time's Arrows Today, appeared in 1995. His current research interest is in the metaphysics of time, in particular the nature of becoming and its relation to being in various spacetimes, such as Minkowski spacetime, that play important roles in modern physics.

Margaret Schabas B.S. A.M. (Indiana), M.A. (Michigan), Ph.D. (Toronto)
Professor of Philosophy

Margaret Schabas has written two monographs, A World Ruled by Number (Princeton, 1990) and The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005), and co-edited two books, Economies in the Age of Newton (Duke, 2003) and David Hume's Political Economy (Routledge, 2007). She has published over forty articles or book chapters, and has served, since 1989, on the editorial board of History of Political Economy and of Economics and Philosophy.

Ori Simchen M.A. (Tel Aviv), Ph.D. (Harvard)
Associate Professor of Philosophy

Ori Simchen works in the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. His research concerns the relationality of content and its points of contact with the metaphysics of modality and essence. His publications include: "On the Impossibility of Non-Actual Epistemic Possibilities" (Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming), "Meaningfulness and Contingent Analyticity" (Nous, 2003), "'Law'" with Jules Coleman (Legal Theory, 2003), "Rules and Mention" (Philosophical Quarterly, 2001), and "Quotational Mixing of Use and Mention" (Philosophical Quarterly, 1999).

Christopher Stephens B.A. (Kansas), Ph.D. (Wisconsin)
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Christopher Stephens specializes in philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and epistemology. Recent publications include "Modelling Reciprocal Altruism" (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1996) and "When is it Selectively Advantageous to Have True Beliefs?" (Philosophical Studies, 2001). His current research interests include drift and chance in evolutionary biology, the evolution of rationality, and the relationship between prudential and epistemic rationality.

Research by Faculty at the Center for Applied Ethics

Peter Danielson B.A. (Michigan), Ph.D (Toronto)
Professor of Applied Ethics

Areas of specialization include ethical theory, cognitive science, applied ethics (environment and technology). Recent publications include Artificial Morality (Routledge, 1992), "Evolutionary Models of Cooperative Mechanisms: Artificial Morality and Genetic Programming," in Modelling Rationality, Morality and Evolution, ed. Peter Danielson (Oxford, 1998) and "Evolution and the Social Contract," Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1998). His main interest is in the development of evolutionary computer models to supplement and replace rational choice and traditional ethical theories.

Michael McDonald B.A. (Toronto), M.A. Ph.D. (Pittsburgh)
Maurice Young Professor of Applied Ethics

McDonald is the author or co-author of a number of reports in applied ethics, including The Ethics Reading Handbook and the Code of Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. His articles have appeared in a number of philosophy and law journals and in books and anthologies dealing with ethical, applied ethics or human rights issues. His current research is on the ethical treatment of research participants.

Scott Anderson B.A. (Indiana), PhD. (Chicago) Assistant Professor of Philosophy
	Scott Anderson works in moral, social and political philosophy. His dissertation is on the nature of coercion. He also works on issues around gender and feminism, including prostitution, sexual harassment, and rape. Within moral philosophy, he is interested in neo-Aristotelian thinkers, consequentialism, and action theory. He first publication appears in Ethics.
Paul Bartha B.A. (Toronto), Ph.D (Pittsburgh) Associate Professor of Philosophy
	A specialist in philosophy of science, logic and philosophical logic, Paul Bartha's research interests include the foundations of probability, confirmation, deontic logic, and ancient and early modern metaphysics. He is writing a book on analogical reasoning in the sciences and a set of papers on conditional probability. Publications include "Probability and Symmetry"(Philosophy of Science, 2001) with Richard Johns, "Countable Additivity and the de Finetti Lottery" (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2004), and "Taking Stock of Infinite Value: Pascal's Wager and Relative Utilities" (Synthese, forthcoming).
Roberta Ballarin Laurea (Venice), M.A., Ph.D. (UCLA) Assistant Professor of Philosophy
	Roberta Ballarin specializes in philosophy of logic, metaphysics and philosophy of language. Recent examples of work include "Validity and Necessity" in The Journal of Philosophical Logic (2005) and "The Interpretation of Necessity and the Necessity of Interpretation" in The Journal of Philosophy (2004).
John Beatty B.S. (Tulane), Ph.D (Indiana) Professor of Philosophy
	John Beatty specializes in history and philosophy of science, especially the conceptual foundations, methodology, and social-political dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology. He is currently working on two major projects: the distinction between the so-called "historical sciences" (including evolutionary biology) vs the "exact" or "experimental sciences," and the atomic age, cold war, and national security dimensions of genetics and evolutionary biology in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.
Sylvia Berryman B.A. (UBC), M.A. (Oregon), PhD. (Texas) Associate Professor of Philosophy
	Sylvia Berryman works on ancient Greek philosophy, with a special interest in post-Aristotelian philosophy and the interactions between ancient natural philosophy and the early sciences. She has written articles on philosophical responses to ancient theories of optics, medicine, pneumatics, mixture, void, and mechanics. Currently she is working on a book manuscript entitled Mechanical Explanation in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy.
Andrew Irvine B.A. (Saskatchewan), M.A. (Western Ontario), Ph.D. (Sydney) Professor of Philosophy
	A specialist on Bertrand Russell, Andrew Irvine also works on topics in the philosophy of logic and mathematics and in political theory. Edited and authored books include Socrates on Trial (University of Toronto Press, 2008), Mistakes of Reason (with Kent Peacocke, eds., University of Toronto Press, 2006), David Stove's On Enlightenment (Transaction, 2003), Argument (with John Woods and Douglas Walton, Prentice-Hall, 2000), Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments (in 4 volumes, Routledge, 1999), Russell and Analytic Philosophy (with G.A. Wedeking, University of Toronto Press, 1993), Physicalism in Mathematics (Kluwer, 1990), and In the Agora: The Public Face of Canadian Philosophy (with John Russell, University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Dominic McIver Lopes B.A. Hons (McGill), D.Phil. (Oxford) Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar
	Dom Lopes works in philosophy of art and philosophy of mind. He is author of Understanding Pictures (Oxford, 1996) and Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford, 2005). His papers have appeared in such journals as Mind, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, the Monist, and Philosophical Psychology. He is also co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (2000, 2005), Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts (2003), Philosophy of Literature (2003), and Blackwell's New Directions in Aesthetics book series. (Please visit the UBC Aesthetics Group's page for more information about research in aesthetics)
Alan Richardson B.A. (Pennsylvania), M.A. (Pittsburgh); Ph.D. (Illinois at Chicago) Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar
	Alan Richardson specializes in history and philosophy of science in the era from from Kant to the present. He is author of Carnap's Construction of the World (Cambridge, 1997). He is co-editor of Origins of Logical Empiricism (Minnesota, 1996), Logical Empiricism in North America (Minnesota, forthcoming), and the Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (forthcoming). He is an advisor in the UBC Science Studies Program.
Paul Russell B.A. (Queen's), M.A. (Edinburgh), Ph.D. (Cambridge) Professor of Philosophy
	Paul Russell works on various problems and issues in the areas of free will and moral responsibility, the history of philosophy (particularly Hume) and philosophy of religion. He is the author of Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1995) and The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion (Oxford University Press, 2007/in press). He is currently working on The Limits of Free Will: The Classical and Contemporary Debate (Blackwell, under contract) and is editing, with Peter Millican, David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford University Press, "World's Classics).
Steven Savitt A.B. (Columbia), Ph.D. (Brandeis) Professor of Philosophy
	Steven Savitt's areas of specialization include philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology. He has published articles in a wide variety of journals and his edited collection of papers on the direction of time, Time's Arrows Today, appeared in 1995. His current research interest is in the metaphysics of time, in particular the nature of becoming and its relation to being in various spacetimes, such as Minkowski spacetime, that play important roles in modern physics.
Margaret Schabas B.S. A.M. (Indiana), M.A. (Michigan), Ph.D. (Toronto) Professor of Philosophy
	Margaret Schabas has written two monographs, A World Ruled by Number (Princeton, 1990) and The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago, 2005), and co-edited two books, Economies in the Age of Newton (Duke, 2003) and David Hume's Political Economy (Routledge, 2007). She has published over forty articles or book chapters, and has served, since 1989, on the editorial board of History of Political Economy and of Economics and Philosophy.
Ori Simchen M.A. (Tel Aviv), Ph.D. (Harvard) Associate Professor of Philosophy
	Ori Simchen works in the philosophy of language and mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. His research concerns the relationality of content and its points of contact with the metaphysics of modality and essence. His publications include: "On the Impossibility of Non-Actual Epistemic Possibilities" (Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming), "Meaningfulness and Contingent Analyticity" (Nous, 2003), "'Law'" with Jules Coleman (Legal Theory, 2003), "Rules and Mention" (Philosophical Quarterly, 2001), and "Quotational Mixing of Use and Mention" (Philosophical Quarterly, 1999).
Christopher Stephens B.A. (Kansas), Ph.D. (Wisconsin) Assistant Professor of Philosophy
	Christopher Stephens specializes in philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, and epistemology. Recent publications include "Modelling Reciprocal Altruism" (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1996) and "When is it Selectively Advantageous to Have True Beliefs?" (Philosophical Studies, 2001). His current research interests include drift and chance in evolutionary biology, the evolution of rationality, and the relationship between prudential and epistemic rationality.

Peter Danielson B.A. (Michigan), Ph.D (Toronto) Professor of Applied Ethics
	Areas of specialization include ethical theory, cognitive science, applied ethics (environment and technology). Recent publications include Artificial Morality (Routledge, 1992), "Evolutionary Models of Cooperative Mechanisms: Artificial Morality and Genetic Programming," in Modelling Rationality, Morality and Evolution, ed. Peter Danielson (Oxford, 1998) and "Evolution and the Social Contract," Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1998). His main interest is in the development of evolutionary computer models to supplement and replace rational choice and traditional ethical theories.
Michael McDonald B.A. (Toronto), M.A. Ph.D. (Pittsburgh) Maurice Young Professor of Applied Ethics
	McDonald is the author or co-author of a number of reports in applied ethics, including The Ethics Reading Handbook and the Code of Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans. His articles have appeared in a number of philosophy and law journals and in books and anthologies dealing with ethical, applied ethics or human rights issues. His current research is on the ethical treatment of research participants.