Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, Spring 2020

Stephen Stich is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University and honorary professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 1989, he taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, and the University of California-San Diego. His publications include seven books, thirteen anthologies and over 200 articles. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the Jean Nicod Prize, the first recipient of the Gittler Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contribution in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences and a winner of the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, awarded by the Phi Beta Kappa Society in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association. Stich was one of the founders of the experimental philosophy movement, and his former students – including Shaun Nichols, Jonathan Weinberg, Ron Mallon, and Edouard Machery – are now among the leaders in the field.

Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows 2019-2020

Richard Bradley is professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He works mainly on decision making under uncertainty, but has broad research interests in formal epistemology, value theory, social choice, and philosophy of language (especially conditionals). His recent book “Decision with a Human Face” attempts to provide a theory of rational belief attitude formation and decision making for agents that face uncertainty taking a variety of forms and that are aware of their own bounds. During his time at Princeton, he will be looking at the implications of scientific uncertainty for policy making and focusing on the question of how to assess policies that differ in the nature and extent of the uncertainty that they impose on people.

Greg Bognar is a senior lecturer in practical philosophy at Stockholm University. His research interests are in ethics and political philosophy, especially population-level bioethics and what is known as politics, philosophy and economics (PPE). At Princeton, he will be working on philosophical and normative issues raised by demographic trends: the demands of justice between generations in rapidly aging societies, the value of increasing longevity, and the problem of overpopulation ­— in short, how societies should adapt and respond to the consequences of demographic change.

Ben Bramble is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His main research interests are moral and political philosophy. He has proposed a new kind of hedonism about well-being on which diversity of pleasure is intrinsically valuable. He has also argued that only lifetime well-being, rather than temporal well-being (i.e., momentary or periodic), is intrinsically normatively significant [“The Passing of Temporal Well-Being” (Routledge, 2018)]. While at Princeton, he will be working on a book about the ethics of AI.

Randolph Clarke is professor of philosophy at Florida State University. His research focuses on action theory, free will, and moral responsibility. He is author of “Libertarian Accounts of Free Will” (Oxford University Press, 2003) and “Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility” (Oxford University Press, 2014). While at Princeton, he will be working on a book about the nature of the agency that grounds our responsibility, and the nature of the responsibility that it grounds.

Dorota Mokrosinska is assistant professor of philosophy at Leiden University. Her research interests are in political philosophy and public ethics. Her published papers take up questions concerning political authority and obligation, privacy, secrecy and transparency in democratic politics. She has a developing interest in media ethics. She is the author of “Rethinking Political Obligation: Moral Principles, Communal Ties, Citizenship” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor (with B. Roessler) of “Social Dimensions of Privacy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (Cambridge University Press, 2015). While at Princeton, she will work on a book project exploring the legitimacy of secrecy in democratic governance, and finalize the editing of a collection of essays for Routledge, “Contested Trade-Offs: Secrecy and Transparency in European Democracies.”

Avia Pasternak is an associate professor in global ethics in the Department of Political Science, University College London. Her research covers a variety of topics in political philosophy, with primary interest in political obligations and collective responsibility in unjust states. Her research was published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, Political Studies, Politics Philosophy Economics, and The Journal of Applied Philosophy. In 2018-19 she was awarded the British Academy Senior Research Fellowship. At Princeton, she will be working on the permissibility of riots as a form of protest in unjust democracies.

Sahar Sadjadi is an anthropologist, a medical doctor, and a fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study. Her research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, gender, and sexuality studies and childhood studies. Her recent project has examined how medicine approaches bodies in transition across life stage and sex. She is interested in the potentials and limits of biomedicine when implicated in the projects of social justice, and the temporal and affective politics governing biomedical interventions that seek to enhance the life chances of marginalized children. At Princeton, she will research the ethical implications of current medical treatments to suppress growth and puberty among children diagnosed with precocious puberty, gender variant children, and disabled children.  

Justin Tiwald is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. He works on Chinese philosophy broadly construed, but has largely focused on Confucian, Daoist, and neo-Confucian accounts of moral psychology, well-being, and political authority, as well as the significance of Confucian views for virtue ethics, moral epistemology, and individual and human rights. He is also a translator of historical Chinese texts and series co-editor (with Eric L. Hutton) of Oxford Chinese Thought.  At Princeton, he will be working on a project that explores and develops competing Confucian views about moral expertise and moral self-reliance or autonomy.

Daniel Viehoff is an assistant professor of philosophy at New York University. He works on topics in political, legal, moral and social philosophy, with a particular focus on democracy, authority and normative questions surrounding social and political power. While at Princeton, he plans to investigate the normative structure of what lawyers call ‘fiduciary relationships,’ in the hope that doing so will help shed light both on the morality of power relations and on the ethics of harm.