News

Ezra Rubenstein's article, "Two Approaches to Metaphysical Explanation", which was published in Nous in 2024, has been selected for inclusion in The Philosopher's Annual, as one of the ten best philosophy articles of that year. Rubenstein earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers in 2023, and is now an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Congratulations Ezra! 

Frances Kamm has been elected Vice President of the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division. After serving as vice president during 2025-26, she will serve as President during 2026-27. Professor Kamm is the Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor here at Rutgers. She is known for her work on normative and practical ethics, in which she has written many articles and ten books, including, most recently, Rights and Their Limits: In Theory, Cases, and Pandemics. We congratulate...

Professor Martha Brandt Bolton passed away on October 27, 2024. She was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and did her undergraduate work at Ohio Wesleyan University. After briefly studying at Tulane, she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. She spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and began her long career at Rutgers University in 1971, retiring only last year. When Martha arrived, Rutgers was divided into several residential colleges, each with its...

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Professor Bolton was a renowned expert on Aristotle who taught at Rutgers for 52 years. After earning his B.A. at Princeton (including a senior thesis on Plato’s Theory of Forms, directed by Gregory Vlastos), he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he worked with G.E.L. Owen, writing on Plato’s Cratylus. Rob earned his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on the Cratylus under the direction of Julius Moravscik and Nicholas White. He came to Rutgers in 1971, where he...

It is with sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Alvin Goldman, a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University from 2002 until his retirement in 2018. Born on October 1, 1938, he died on August 4, 2024. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1960, and his PhD from Princeton in 1965. He taught at the University of Michigan (1963-1980), followed by positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1980-1983) and the University of Arizona (1983-2002), before coming to...

A paper by Assistant Professor Jake Quilty-Dunn and a paper by 2019 Ph.D. Eddy Chen were chosen for the 2022 Philosopher’s Annual, representing the best work in the discipline that year.  Quilty-Dunn’s “The Best Game in Town: The Re-emergence of the Language of Thought Hypothesis Across the Cognitive Sciences” (co-authored with Nicholas Porot and Eric Mandelbaum) appears in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences.  They defend the idea that the classical computational symbolic structures posited by the...

Xudong Ma, a double major in philosophy and linguistics, has been selected as a recipient of the Koury Walker First-Generation Student Summer Scholarship for his research on 'Reference and Variability of Semantics' under the supervision of Professor Pietroski. Congratulations Xudong! 

Jake Khawaja to give a Symposium at the 2023 Eastern APA "My paper Rationalizing the Principal Principle for Non-Humean Chance. The paper is about the intersection of two questions. (1) what is the right way to think about the metaphysics of objective probability (i.e., chance)? And (2) what are the rational credences to adopt in light of information about the objective probability of some event? Answers to the first question broadly define between Humean and Non-Humean accounts of chance...

Professor Guerrero and Denise Dykstra received the 2022 School of Arts and Sciences Award for their Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education Each year, awards for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education are given to professors and teaching assistants in the School of Arts and Sciences to recognize their outstanding achievements in and beyond the classroom, their engagement with their students and pedagogic communities, and their overall commitment to the...

Rhymes and Reasons: Hip Hop and Philosophy01:730:256 (3 credits) Core: CCDProfessor Derrick Darby, Philosophy Hip hop is great for partying but what can we learn if we study the rhymes? Chuck D—pioneer from the hip hop group Public Enemy—once said that “rap is black America’s CNN.” In addition to gaining insight about the realities of life in America’s dark ghettos, studying rap rhymes can aid philosophical reflection and reasoning about identity, injustice, and inequality in these...

2022 Lebowitz Prize Awarded to Philosophers Cristina Lafont and Alex Guerrero The American Philosophical Association (APA) and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (PBK) are pleased to announce that Dr. Cristina Lafont, Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, and Dr. Alex Guerrero, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, have won the 2022 Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution. Awarded...

Recent Ph.D. Eddy Chen, now an assistant professor at UCSD, has won the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science’s Popper Prize, for best article  [Quantum Mechanics in a Time-Asymmetric Universe: On the Nature of the Initial Quantum State] published in the journal in 2021. Congratulations to Eddy! The Popper Prize (formerly the Sir Karl Popper Essay Prize) is awarded by the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (BJPS) “to the article judged to  be the best published in that year’s...

Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy Profile by Mercedes Diaz & Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen March 16, 2022 Rutgers Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy is a seven-day program on the Rutgers University Campus in New Brunswick designed to encourage students from various cultural, ethnic and social-economic backgrounds to consider a career in academic philosophy. Under the supervision of the institute staff, these students will explore various areas and methodologies in...

Laurent Stern was a member of the Rutgers faculty for more than 30 years.  Professor Stern began at Rutgers College, and helped unify the scattered departments of the various colleges into the unified department we have today.  His scholarship on interpretation, including his book, Interpretive Reasoning, had an impact in both the philosophic and the general academic community. The department extends its deepest condolences. 

Triple major Nate Serio to pursue PhD in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science Nate Serio arrived at Rutgers three years ago with lofty goals: publish a paper as an undergrad, graduate summa cum laude and earn a scholarship to help him pursue his PhD. His plan was to shoot for the stars and if he landed on the moon, that wasn’t half bad either. Today Serio’s star is still rising. A triple major in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers-New Brunswick, he is on track to graduate with...

Students in Justin Kalef’s “Logic, Reason, and Persuasion” class at Rutgers University take a deep dive into some divisive issues. And they can expect, over the course of the semester, to have their positions challenged—perhaps by the person sitting next to them. Kalef, a teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy, School of Arts and Sciences, gets this undergraduate course underway by surveying students on such topical hot buttons as abortion, gun control, and tax policy. “Then I put...

We're happy to announce that Howard McGary, Professor of Philosophy, received a 2019 Clement A. Price Human Dignity Award for outstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion through his work with the annual Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy for 25 years. The Institute provides outreach to undergraduates on a nationwide basis to increase the number of underrepresented minority students in philosophy graduate programs and faculty positions. Meeting every summer for the last two...

Managing Moral Outrage: How Philosophy Can Change Your (Emotional) Life (click for flyer) This year's undergraduate committee: Rivky Brandwein, Aysenur Guc, Matthew Rotolo and Andreas Kauderer. Professor Rosen is a professor of metaphysics, ethics, metaethics, and philosophy of mathematics at Princeton University. He currently serves as Chair of Princeton’s Philosophy Department in addition to holding the position of Stuart Professor of Philosophy. Since joining the department at Princeton in...

Rutgers Today talks with Guerrero about how ending elections would free us from the tyranny of false campaign promises and wealthy special interests, and make government look more like a cross section of American society. He also proposes a smaller-scale version to solve intractable issues like climate change. Please read the Q&A here.      

Remembering Marco Dees It is with profound sadness that we report the death of Marco Dees on July 22 in a climbing accident in Grand Teton National Park. Marco came to Rutgers after studying philosophy at Saint Andrews. He wrote a dissertation on the metaphysics of quantities, space, and time, receiving his Ph.D. in 2015. Dean Zimmerman and Jonathan Schaffer were his co-advisors. He had begun to publish papers based on his thesis (in Thought and Pacific Philosophical Quarterly), and to teach, first...

Rutgers Alumnus Wins Lakatos Award! Craig Callender has been announced as one of the recipients of the 2018 Lakatos Award for his book What Makes Time Special? (Oxford University Press, 2017). Craig Callender is a Professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego. Prior to that he worked in the Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. He obtained his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1997. Congratulations Craig!    

Over the course of his 49 year career (48 years of which were spent at Rutgers), Peter established himself as a giant in the field of aesthetics, especially in the philosophy of music. Sadly, Peter passed away in 2017. To honor his memory, the Rutgers Philosophy Department is hosting a one-day conference on October 26, 2018, celebrating his life's philosophical work. The Conference will include talks by Christy Mag Uidhir (Houston), Jenefer Robinson (Cincinnati), Jerrold Levinson (Maryland),...