Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology, particularly Ontology, Agency, Time, and Modality, which additional interests in Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Early Modern Philosophy.
Osup Kwon
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action, Epistemology, Philosophy of Race, Philosophy of Religion
Taylor Doran
Education
BA Philosophy, UCLA 2013
Areas of Interest
Ethics and Value Theory, including aesthetics and political theory; History of Philosophy, especially Ancient Greek; Feminism
Profile
You can find more information about me at my website www.taylordoran.info.
Akshay Ganesh
Areas of Interest
19th Century German philosophy, Ethics, Moral Psychology, Emotion, Philosophy of Race.
Shamoni Sarkar
Education
B.A. Philosophy and Spanish, Mount Holyoke College, 2013
M.A. University of Chicago, 2015
Areas of Interest
19th and 20th century continental philosophy, particularly Hegel and phenomenology; aesthetics; critical theory; and Latin American philosophy.
Profile
Shamoni wrote her Masters thesis on the role of individual artistic creativity in Hegel’s aesthetics. Along these lines, she is interested in the question of how individuals develop interior (or private) lives while still being shaped by larger socio-historical systems of ideas and culture.
Marek Twarzynski
Education
B.A. with Honors, Philosophy, Stanford University, 2015
Areas of Interest
Ethics, meta-ethics, moral psychology, and the theory of agency, and how these problems are treated in the history of modern philosophy, particularly in Nietzsche and also in Kant, Sartre, and Foucault.
Profile
Marek is interested in broadly historical and contemporary issues in normative ethics, meta-ethics, agency, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. His primary research centers around how Nietzsche speaks to each of these topics, and this leads him to secondary research in modern philosophy, including Kant, the existentialists, Foucault, and beyond. His current projects focus on Nietzsche’s views of knowledge, agency, autonomy, and the role and value of suffering.
Tom Hanauer
Education
B.A., Indiana University of Pennsylvania
M.A., Binghamton University
Areas of Interest
Ethics, Moral Psychology, Aesthetics, 19th-20th Century German Philosophy (esp. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, and the Frankfurt School).
Mara Garza
Education
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2012
Visiting Scholar, University of Pittsburgh, 2013
Areas of Interest
Ethics and mind, their intersections, and historical interests in Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche
Profile
Mara is interested in ethics, mind, and their intersections in moral psychology, the structure of agency, artificial agents and virtual extension, self-governance and mental illness, practical cognition and moral feelings, and identity and gender. Visit Mara’s website.
Jared Smith
Education
B.A., Philosophy/Religion, Political Science — Flagler College, 2011 Summa Cum Laude
M.A., Philosophy — University of Houston, 2014
Contact Information
Areas of Interest
Moral psychology, philosophy of action, ethics, metaethics, philosophy of psychiatry
Profile
Jared focuses primarily on moral responsibility and agency, with some of his previous research concerning the way reactive attitudes feature into our responsibility practices, as well as the role revenge and retributive acts play in our normative systems.
While continuing to work on these topics, Jared also researches how psychopathology can inform our theories of personal identity, the theoretical requirements for the blame of distant, dead, or fictional entities, as well as the connection between human activity, value, and meaning. Other topics of philosophical interest include Humean constructivism, and the intersection and interplay between the nosology and ontology of mental disorders.
Andrew MacDonald
Education
University of California, Berkeley
Contact Information
Areas of Interest
Kant, 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy, Ethics, Meta-ethics
