Faculty
John Bengson
Associate Professor (University of Texas, Ph.D. 2010)
Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: bengson@wisc.edu
Office: 5169 Helen C. White
Professor Bengson's research focuses on issues in philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophical methodology, philosophy of action, and moral psychology, including perception, intuition, know-how, intelligence and intelligent action, and understanding. His recent and forthcoming publications include "The Unity of Understanding" (in Making Sense of the World, 2017), "Practical Perception and Intelligent Action" (Philosophical Issues, 2016), "The Intellectual Given" (Mind, 2015), and "Grasping the Third Realm" (Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 2015). He is also co-editor of Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action (Oxford University Press, 2011/2014). In 2016-17 he is a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University.
John Bengson’s Web site
Harry Brighouse
Professor (USC, Ph.D. 1991)
Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: mhbrigho@wisc.edu
Office: 5119 Helen C. White
Harry Brighouse works on issues in political philosophy, philosophy of education, and educational policy. His recent books include On Education (Routledge 2006), Educational Equality (2010) and (edited with Ingrid Robeyns) Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (Cambridge 2010). His book with Adam Swift, Family Values will be published by Princeton University Press in summer 2014. He teaches 341 Contemporary Moral Issues and 555 Political Philosophy, among other classes. He also co-directs the Spencer Foundation's Initiative on Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice.
Harry Brighouse’s Web site
Emily Fletcher
Assistant Professor (University of Toronto, Ph.D. 2012)
Mellon Chair in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: erfletcher@wisc.edu
Office: 5173 Helen C. White
Professor Fletcher’s research interests lie primarily in Ancient Greek Philosophy, especially ethics and moral psychology. She has written several articles about the examination of pleasure in Plato's Philebus, and she is currently working on the relationship between the body and the soul in Plato's Timaeus. Her recent publications include "Plato on Pure Pleasure and the Best Life" (Phronesis 2014), "Aisthēsis, Reason and Appetite in the Timaeus" (Phronesis 2016) and "The Divine Method and the Disunity of Pleasure in the Philebus" (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2017).
Emily Fletcher's Web site
Martha Gibson
Faculty Associate an Undergraduate Advisor (UW Madison, Ph.D. 1989)
Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind
Phone: 608-263-3747
Email: migibson@wisc.edu
Office: 5117 Helen C. White
Professor Gibson works in philosophy of language and mind and on Kant. She has written on ‘the unity of the proposition’ (“The Unity of the Sentence and the Connection of Causes”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and the book, From Naming to Saying, Blackwell 2004) in which she proposes a pragmatic (Gricean) solution to the problem. She has published on causal and information theoretic accounts of meaning (“Asymmetric Dependencies, Ideal Conditions, and Meaning” Philosophical Psychology), Free Will (“Of One’s Own Free Will” with Dennis Stampe, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), and on Kant (most recently, “A Revolution in Method: Kant’s ‘Copernican Hypothesis’ and the Necessity of Natural Laws” Kant Studien, and “A Fregean Reading of Kant’s Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy). Her current research centers on representational theories of consciousness and free will.
Paula Gottlieb
Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Classics (B.Phil, Oxon. 1983; Ph.D., Cornell 1988)
Ancient Greek Philosophy; Ethics
Phone: 608-263-0253
Email: plgottli@wisc.edu
Office: 5139 Helen C. White
Professor Gottlieb’s research concerns ancient Greek philosophy, especially issues in Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics. Her work includes a book-length analysis of and commentary on Books I and II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for Project Archelogos(2001), “The Practical Syllogism” in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethicsed. Richard Kraut (Blackwell, 2006), a recent book The Virtue of Aristotle’s Ethics(Cambridge, 2009, pbk 2012) and the chapter on Aristotle’s Ethics for the Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford, 2013). She is writing another book, tentatively entitled "Aristotle on Reason and Feeling", for Cambridge University Press, with various related papers forthcoming. She also writes the entry on Aristotle on non-contradiction for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (last updated, 2015). She was Central Divisional Representative to the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association, 2012-15, and has been awarded an NEH fellowship for 2018-19.
Paula Gottlieb’s Web site
Daniel M. Hausman
Herbert A. Simon Professor (Columbia, Ph.D. 1978)
Philosophy of Economics, Metaphysics
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: dhausman@wisc.edu
Office: 5197 Helen C. White
Professor Hausman’s research focuses on ethical, epistemological, and foundational issues at the boundaries between economics and philosophy, and on related questions concerning causation and health measurement. His main work on economic methodology is his The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (Cambridge, 1992). Other books include Causal Asymmetries (Cambridge, 1998), Preference, Value, Choice and Welfare 2011, Valuing Health: Well-Being, Freedom, and Suffering (Oxford, 2015), and Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy (with Michael S. McPherson, Cambridge, 2006; 3rd. edition, with Michael S. McPherson and Debra Satz forthcoming early in 2017). In 2009 Hausman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Daniel M. Hausman’s Web site
Paul Kelleher
Associate Professor (Cornell, Ph.D. 2008)
Political Philosophy, Bioethics
Phone: 608-263-8561
Email: jkelleher@wisc.edu
Offices: 1430 Medical Sciences Center
Professor Kelleher works in areas of applied ethics and political philosophy that address the health of populations. Specific teaching and research interests include the nature of distributive justice and its implications for health policy; the ethics of rationing and health resource priority-setting; and climate change ethics and economics. His main current project explores philosophical dimensions of the social cost of carbon, a key concept for regulatory policy concerned with climate change. Recent publications include "Health Inequalities and Relational Egalitarianism” in Walker, Buchbinder, and Rivkin-Fish (eds.) Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice (in press), “Capabilities versus Resources” Journal of Moral Philosophy (2015), “Is There A Sacrifice-Free Solution to Climate Change?” Ethics, Policy & Environment (2015), and “Relevance and Non-Consequentialist Aggregation” Utilitas (2014).
Paul Kelleher's Web site
John Mackay
Assistant Professor (Princeton, Ph.D. 2011)
Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Philosophical Logic
Phone: 608-890-3700
Email: jmackay2@wisc.edu
Office: 5167 Helen C. White
Professor Mackay works in the philosophy of language and associated areas of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophical logic. His current research is focused on modality and conditionals. Recent publications are “Quantifying over Possibilities” (Philosophical Review, 2013) and “Actuality and Fake Tense in Conditionals” (Semantics and Pragmatics, 2015).
John Mackay’s Web site
Farid Masrour
Assistant Professor (Arizona, Ph.D. 2008)
Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, Philosophical Logic
Email: masrour@wisc.edu
Farid specializes in philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, and Kant’s theoretical philosophy. His current research focuses on understanding the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience and its relation to cognition, the best way to characterize perceptual content and perceptual phenomenology, the role of perceptual experience in justifying beliefs, sensory integration, and the unity of conscious experience. He thinks that a Kantian account provides a unified outlook on these issues and has been working on how to characterize this account in ways that connect to the concerns of contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists. His approach is multi-disciplinary. He combines contemporary analytic methods with evidence from psychology and neuroscience, insights from the phenomenological tradition, and ideas from the history of philosophy. Before coming to UW-Madison, Farid has taught at Harvard and NYU.
Farid Masrour’s Web site
James Messina
Assistant Professor (UCSD, Ph.D. 2011)
Kant, Early Modern Philosophy, German Idealism
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: jmessina@wisc.edu
Office: 5115 Helen C. White
Professor Messina’s research deals with issues in Kant’s mature theoretical philosophy (such as his views on space, philosophical methodology, modality, and the role of the understanding in perception). He also works on earlier German philosophers who had a strong influence on Kant (such as Leibniz, Wolff, and Crusius) and later German philosophers who were strongly influenced by Kant (such as Reinhold, Schulze, Fichte, and Hegel). His recent publications include “Kant on the Unity of Space and the Synthetic Unity of Apperception” (Kant-Studien 2014); “Conceptual Analysis and the Essence of Space: Kant’s Metaphysical Exposition Revisited” (Archiv fuer Gescichte der Philosophie 2015); “The Relationship between Space and Mutual Interaction: Kant Contra Newton and Leibniz” (forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy); and “Kant’s Necessitation Account of Laws and the Nature of Natures” (Forthcoming in Kant and the Laws of Nature, edited by Michaela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach).
James Messina's Web site
Steven Nadler
William H. Hay II Professor (Columbia, Ph.D. 1986)
Evjue-Bascom Professor in HumanitiesEarly Modern Philosophy
Phone: 608-886-6006
Email: smnadler@wisc.edu
Office: 5109 Helen C. White
Professor Nadler’s research focuses on philosophy in the seventeenth century. He has written extensively on Descartes and Cartesianism, Spinoza, and Leibniz. He also works on medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy. His publications include Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999); The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosophers, God, and Evil (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008; paperback, Princeton 2010); and The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century (2009), co-edited with Tamar Rudavsky. His two most recent books are A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age(Princeton, 2011); and The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (Princeton, 2013). Heretics: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press), a graphic book (with Ben Nadler), will be published in June 2017. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Amsterdam, the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. He recently served as the editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy.
Steven Nadler’s Web site
Sarah Paul
Associate Professor (Stanford, Ph.D. 2009)
Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind
Email: skpaul@wisc.edu
Office: 5163 Helen C. White
Professor Paul's research on agency and the philosophy of mind focuses on the nature of intention and belief. She is interested in questions about self-knowledge, self-control, and what we should believe about our own intentional actions, among other things. Recent publications include "Doxastic Self-Control" (American Philosophical Quarterly 2015), "The Courage of Conviction" (Canadian Journal of Philosophy2015), and "The Transparency of Intention" (Philosophical Studies 2015). She is currently writing an introductory book on the philosophy of action for Routledge Press.
Sarah Paul’s Web site-
Anat Schechtman
Assistant Professor (Yale, Ph.D. 2011)
Early Modern Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mathematics
Email: aschechtman@wisc.edu
Professor Schechtman's research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics in the early modern period. She is currently working on various notions of infinity in the seventeenth century in Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz, and on the metaphysics of substance in Descartes and Spinoza. Her paper "Descartes' Argument for the Existence of the Idea of an Infinite Being" recently appeared in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and "Substance and Independence in Descartes" appeared in the Philosophical Review. In 2016-2017 she is a visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Harvard University.
Anat Schechtman's WebsiteWeb site 
Russ Shafer-Landau
Professor (University of Arizona, Ph.D. 1992)
Ethics
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: shaferlandau@wisc.edu
Office: 5165 HC White Hall
Professor Shafer-Landau's primary interest is in ethics. He is the author of Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford 2003), Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? (Oxford 2004), and The Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford 2010). He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop (MadMeta). He is also the director of the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics. Shafer-Landau is currently working on a large collaborative project with UW colleague John Bengson and Terence Cuneo (Vermont) that seeks to offer a new vindication of nonnaturalist moral realism.
Russ Shafer-Landau's Web site
Lawrence Shapiro
Professor (University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. 1992)
Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology
Phone: 608-265-3700
Email: lshapiro@wisc.edu
Office: 5111 HC White Hall
Professor Shapiro’s research spans philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. Within philosophy of mind he has focused on issues related to reduction, especially concerning the thesis of multiple realization. His books The Mind Incarnate (MIT, 2004) and The Multiple Realization Book (co-authored with Professor Thomas Polger at U. of Cincinnati, Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as articles in The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research examine these issues. His interests in philosophy of psychology include topics in computational theories of vision, evolutionary psychology, and embodied cognition. He’s published numerous articles on these topics in journals such as The Philosophical Review, British Journal for Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Science. His book, Embodied Cognition (Routledge Press, 2011), received the American Philosophical Association's Joseph B. Gittler Award for best book in philosophy of the social sciences (2013). His recent interest in philosophy of religion resulted in The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural is Unjustified (Columbia University Press, 2016).
Lawrence Shapiro’s Web site
Alan Sidelle, Department Chair
Professor (Cornell, Ph.D. 1986)
Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Epistemology
Phone: 608-263-3724
Email: asidelle@wisc.edu
Office: 5121 Helen C. White
Professor Sidelle's research focuses centrally on the metaphysics of material objects, modality, and personal identity. He is also interested in questions at the interface of philosophy of language and metaphysics, and in questions about the nature and extent of verbal disputes (which he believes to be widely prevalent in both philosophy and everyday life). His recent publications include: "Modality and Objects," Philosophical Quarterly (2010); "Conventionalism and the Contingency of Conventions," Nous (2010) and "The Method of Verbal Dispute," Philosophical Topics (2007).
Elliott Sober
Hans Reichenbach Professor & William F. Vilas Research Professor (Harvard, Ph.D. 1974)
Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: ersober@wisc.edu
Office: 5199 Helen C. White
Professor Sober’s areas of research are philosophy of science and philosophy of evolutionary biology. His publications include Ockham's Razors — A User's Manual (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Did Darwin write the Origin Backwards? (Prometheus Books, 2011), Evidence and Evolution — the Logic Behind the Science (Cambridge University Press, 2008), Unto Others — The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (with David Sloan Wilson, Harvard University Press, 1998) and Philosophy of Biology (Westview Press, 1993)
Elliott Sober’s Web site
Hank Southgate
Lecturer (Northwestern, Ph.D. 2010)
Kant, 19th century philosophy
Phone: 608-890-3743
Email: southgate@wisc.edu
Office: 5137 Helen C. White
Dr. Southgate specializes in Kant and German Idealism. His current research is focused on Kant and Hegel’s responses to the Rationalist thesis that reality is intelligible to reason.
Hank Southgate's Web site
Jesse Steinberg
Faculty Associate and Assistant to the Chair (University of California Santa Barbara, Ph.D. 2006)
Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science
Phone: 608-263-5162
Email: jesse.steinberg@wisc.edu
Office: 5185 Helen C. White
Professor Steinberg's research primarily focuses on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. He is especially interested in the nature of dispositions and dispositional accounts of various kinds (e.g., of mental states, causation, and free will). He also works on moral philosophy and has lately been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about environmental issues having to do with food.
Robert Streiffer
Associate Professor of Philosophy, Bioethics, Agricultural & Applied Economics, and Veterinary Medical Science (MIT, Ph.D. 1999)
Bioethics, Ethical Theory
Phone: 608-263-3700
Email: rstreiffer@wisc.edu
Office: 5101 Helen C. White
Professor Streiffer's research encompasses bioethics (both medical and agricultural), ethical theory, and political philosophy, with a focus on ethical and policy issues arising from modern biotechnology. His recent publications include ”The Confinement of Animals Used in Laboratory Research: Conceptual and Ethical Issues,” in The Ethics of Captivity, ed. Lori Gruen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), "Ethical Issues in the Application of Biotechnology to Animals in Agriculture," with John Basl, in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics (2011), and "Chimeras, Moral Status, and Public Policy: Implications of the Abortion Debate for Public Policy on Human/Nonhuman Chimera Research," The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics (2010).
Robert Streiffer’s Web site
Michael G. Titelbaum
Associate Professor (University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D. 2008)
Epistemology, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Logic, Decision Theory
Phone: 608-263-6708
Email: titelbaum@wisc.edu
Office: 5113 Helen C. White
Professor Titelbaum’s research focuses on rationality, primarily as it comes up in epistemology and ethics but also as it arises in decision theory, political philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of science. His publications include Quitting Certainties: A Bayesian Framework Modeling Degrees of Belief (Oxford University Press 2013), "Rationality's Fixed Point (Or: In Defense of Right Reason)" Oxford Studies in Epistemology (2014), and "How to Derive a Narrow-Scope Requirement from Wide-Scope Requirements" Philosophical Studies (2014). His book Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Michael G. Titelbaum’s Web site
Peter B. M. Vranas
Professor (MIT, Sc.D. 1992; Michigan, Ph.D. 2001)
Philosophical Logic, Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Formal Epistemology, Metaphysics
Phone: 608-263-3740
Email: vranas@wisc.edu
Office: 5171 Helen C. White
Professor Vranas’s research in philosophical logic focuses on imperative and deontic logic. He is also currently working on moral dilemmas, time travel, and the implications of situationist psychology for ethics. His recent publications include “The indeterminacy paradox: Character evaluations and human psychology” Nous (2005), "I ought, therefore I can" Philosophical Studies (2007), “New foundations for imperative logic I: Logical connectives, consistency, and quantifiers” Nous (2008), “Against moral character evaluations: The undetectability of virtue and vice” The Journal of Ethics (2009), “In defense of imperative inference” Journal of Philosophical Logic (2010), and “New foundations for imperative logic: Pure imperative inference” Mind (2011).
Peter B. M. Vranas’s Web site
Emeritus Faculty
James Anderson
Started at UW: 1990
Retired from UW: 2012
Email: jcander1@wisc.edu
Michael Byrd
Started at UW: 1972
Retired from UW: 2004
Email: mebyrd@wisc.edu
Mike retired from the Philosophy Department in 2004, after 32 years of service, and two years after his son David disappeared in the Ecuadorean Andes. Because of their experiences in Ecuador, Mike and his wife Maggie have spent much of their time since 2004 working in Ecuador. They have served as teachers at The Working Boys Center, a mission to the poor, in Quito. They are also the founding directors of David’s Educational Opportunity Fund, which offers mentoring and university scholarships to some of the talented students whom they have taught while working there. David’s Educational Opportunity Fund is a 501(c)(3) public charity. You can read about its work at davidsedfund.org.
Claudia Card (1940-2015)
Started at UW: 1969
Retired from UW: 2015
Donald Crawford
Started at UW: 1968
Retired from UW: 1992
Fred Dretske (1932-2013)
Started at UW: 1960
Retired from UW: 1990
Haskell Fain
Started at UW: 1956
Retired from UW: 1991
Email: hfain2306@prodigy.net
Malcolm Forster
Started at UW: 1987
Retired from UW: 2017
Email: mforster@wisc.edu
Lester H. Hunt
Started at UW:
Retired from UW: 2016
Email: lhhunt@wisc.edu
Terry Penner
Started at UW: 1970
Retired from UW: 2003
Email: tmpenner@wisc.edu
Marcus Singer
Started at UW: 1952
Retired from UW: 1999
Email: mgsinger@wisc.edu
Ivan Soll
Started at UW: 1965
Retired from UW: 2011
Email: aisoll@wisc.edu
