I began my intellectual life with an interest in mathematics. I have a BA in math from Wesleyan University, an MA in math from Tulane University, and an MS in math from the University at Buffalo.
I was working on a PhD in set theory when I encountered the philosophical puzzle of mathematical truth and undecidability: what should we say about the truth of statements of set theory that cannot be proved or disproved from the standard axioms? Wondering about this, I turned my attention to philosophy, and my interest in mathematical truth grew into an interest in the nature of truth and justification more generally. I did my Philosophy PhD at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and wrote a dissertation on truth, supervised by Penelope Maddy.
Since then my interests have broadened. My current work in metaethics concerns the question of how we ought to reason morally in the context of diverse moral outlooks, plural values, and pervasive moral disagreement. In the philosophy of sex, I focus particularly on objectification. I have written on ambivalence, conflicting desires, and the nature of truth, and I am also still interested in the philosophy of mathematics. I think of philosophy more as a humanistic discipline than as a scientific one, and I have an ongoing concern with the question of what, if anything, makes methods in humanistic study distinctive.
Over time I have become increasingly committed to trying to do philosophy in a way that shows its relevance to the concerns of everyday life. This means aiming to write philosophy in a way that engages readers who are non-specialists in the given topic and, where possible, readers who are not professional philosophers. My blog, The Kramer Is Now, represents one attempt to do philosophy in this way.
I’ve been at the University of Waterloo since 2004. Before that, I was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, and a couple of years ago I spent a semester as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Michigan. I recently won an award from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for my project “Moral Reasoning in a Pluralistic World.”
Page last updated January 14, 2012
