Meet some of our Philosophy Department faculty below! And you can always find a complete list of our faculty and their research interests on our department website.
Lu Chen, Sam Clarke, Shieva Kleinschmidt, Jake Monaghan
Lu Chen
What got you into philosophy? I chose philosophy as my major because it seemed to me the broadest and the most fundamental.
What are you working on? One thing I am working on is a critique of “induced gravity”, the idea that gravity is derived from the nature of (other) matter in quantum theories and beyond. According to this conception, gravity is the elasticity of space, i.e., the resistance of space to deformation, and like how ordinary elastic constants are derived from microphysics, gravity is not fundamental but is derived from the dynamics of high-energy particle physics. As cool as it sounds, this idea has never been subject to close philosophical scrutiny, which is what I, along with other philosophers of physics, aim to address.
What philosophical or other texts have impacted you the most personally? Some of my favorites include Zhuangzi and Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy.” The dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (somewhat like Yin and Yang in Daoism) represents the orderly and measured precision versus passion, undifferentiation, and connectedness. This dichotomy might exactly represent the contrast between my research and personal style!
What philosophical or other texts have influenced your research the most? My research is significantly influenced by mathematical texts. I find some mathematical theorems and their proofs extraordinarily beautiful. For example, one of my favorites is the fixed-point theorem (and its proof in algebraic topology) according to which, if you are on campus and put a map of California on the ground, there is at least one point in your map that spatially coincides with the location it represents. Physics also holds a distinct beauty for me. For instance, the Standard Model is elegant in its own way despite the mathematical mess!
Sam Clarke
How did you get into Philosophy? I had a circuitous route into philosophy. I was a curious kid who was naturally drawn to philosophical questions. But as a teenager I got *way too* into rock climbing and had essentially no aspirations to do anything else. Regardless, I eventually went to the University of Edinburgh to study for a degree called Community Education. Half of the course was practical and involved me taking troubled young people, who had been excluded from mainstream education, into the outdoors; the other half was more academic, involving lectures on things like social policy and politics. But while the initial appeal of the course had been the practical element – I was hoping that it would enable me to get a fulfilling job introducing young people to fun adventures in the mountains – I quickly realised that I liked the academic side of things more. So, after a year, I swapped into Politics, before realising that I was actually interested in political philosophy and swapping into Philosophy (where I proceeded to do virtually no political philosophy and get really into the philosophy of mind).
What is something you're working on? I’m working on a few things at the moment, but one project that I’m particularly excited about concerns the properties and happenings we see. Suppose you look at your fruit bowl. Do you simply see things like the colour, shape, and texture of the fruit? Or could you also visually experience a given fruit item as an apple or the collection of fruit in the bowl as totalling 7 in number, rather than merely judging that this is so?
Philosophers have debated such questions for millennia. But in the age of experimental psychology and neuroscience, researchers have increasingly sought to settle these matters by appealing to visual ‘adaptation’ effects. You’ve probably experienced these for yourselves. If you stare at a green surface for some time, you might find that a white page appears reddish. Here, your visual system has adapted to green, and this causes a neutral stimulus (the white page) to look as if it has some opponent value. Remarkably, researchers report similar effects to less obviously visible properties also. For instance, if you stare at 300dots for 30seconds and are immediately presented with a middling collection of 100dots in the same region of space, that middling collection will now look like it contains significantly less dots than it otherwise would. This is meant to show that when we look at a collection of dots (or a fruit bowl) we don’t just experience the colour, brightness, and shape of the items it contains; we also see their number, leading to striking and easily appreciable visual aftereffects.
I’m skeptical. In the case described above, my collaborators (Sami Yousif and Liz Brannon) and I doubt that the effects observed involve us adapting to number at all; rather, we think that our visual system is simply filtering out dots that it deems ‘old news’ (i.e., as dots seen in the original display), effectively rendering these invisible so as to make ‘new’ dots more salient (if this sounds far-fetched, try googling ‘Troxler fading’ or ‘Motion Induced Blindness’ and experience related effects for yourself!). What’s especially cool (for me, as a philosopher, who normally thinks about these things from the armchair) is that having developed this alternative explanation for the abovementioned results, we’ve proceeded to run almost 20 experiments which bear out the predictions of our hypothesis. For me, taking philosophical arguments and concerns, and using them to advance our scientific understanding of the mind in this way is incredibly exciting.
What is the strangest view you endorse? I don’t find any of the views that I endorse strange! That said, I am attracted to a fairly intellectualist view of the human mind. Consider the case of numbers again. People often think of numeracy and mathematics as the height of the human intellect. However, I’ve argued that very young human infants and many non-human animals have an innate capacity to represent both natural numbers (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…) and rational numbers (e.g., 0.8 and ¼), and to perform basic arithmetic operations on these numerical quantities (e.g., add two such numbers together). Of course, I’m not the only person who defends such a view. However, most proponents of this suggestion will still hold that infants are limited to representing numerical quantities very imprecisely, and that they thereby fail to grasp 8 as being precisely 1 more than 7. My view is that this is a mistake. There is, for instance, considerable evidence that when young infants are learning the grammar of their native language, they are keeping track of the precise number of cases in which grammatical rules are followed, the precise number of cases in which they are violated, and appreciating the ratios between these numbers.
What advice do you have for undergrads just starting out at USC? Be curious. I think the biggest mistake that people make when they are starting out in philosophy is that they spend too much time trying to say things which are interesting or provocative, rather than simply trying to figure our what’s true. While I get the appeal of this approach, I think that trying to understand the way things actually are/work/should be almost always ends up being more interesting, fulfilling, and fruitful.
Shieva Kleinschmidt
How did you get into Philosophy? I grew up around a lot of discussions of the Big Questions (Why are we here? Does God exist? What's right and wrong?), but they mainly involved speculation and story-telling. When I took my first Philosophy course, I encountered careful, precise treatments of the topics, where views are expected to be supported with argument. I loved this methodical, clear approach and thought "I want my mind to work like that." I've been hooked on Philosophy ever since.
Describe a course you teach at USC. Sometimes I teach 300-level Metaphysics and Epistemology, which is one of the department's Gateway Courses. The idea with these is that students should begin by taking a 100- or 200-level Intro Course, then take a 300-level Gateway Course. In the Gateway Courses a large focus is on teaching you how to write Philosophy papers. And this gives you preparation for our more advanced, and more topical, 400-level courses.
What is the strangest view you endorse? I'm inclined to think that spacetime regions can time-travel. Which sounds really weird, until I explain it, when it sounds only moderately weird. There's a view called 'Supersubstantivalism' that says that every material object is actually just space (or spacetime), perhaps curved in various ways at a reeeeealy microscopic level to give rise to the properties we see around us. I'm inclined to think people are identical to temporally extended chunks of spacetime that are like that. And I think it's logically and metaphysically possible (though maybe not physically possible) for such people to time-travel. Since I think people are just regions of spacetime, I think those can time-travel. This will just involve the region being looped around so that the region overlaps a single time more than once.
What's a piece of pop-culture that you really like or really dislike? Recent likes: The Last of Us (S1 E3 especially), The Good Place, Insecure, and Bluey (my kids have me hooked - especially the episode where Bingo dreams of space). Dislikes: Game of Thrones: Season 8, Baby Shark.
What advice do you have for undergrads just starting out at USC? This is for everybody, but as first-gen, I found it especially helpful in my first semester when I bought a book on notetaking and time-management skills. A big part of doing well in college is just keeping up on your work, breaking big tasks down into smaller ones, and finishing stuff at a steady pace instead of letting it build up until the last minute. Also, if you're first-gen and want to chat about it, feel free to contact me.
Jake Monaghan
How did you get into Philosophy?I got into philosophy by taking an introduction to philosophy class my first semester as an undergrad. When I was young, I was especially interested in morality and politics, but I had never read philosophy before. I didn’t know people were thinking and writing about this in a sophisticated way, and it was an eye-opening experience. I enjoyed it, and I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I just kept doing it.
What is something you're working on?I recently finished a book project on the political philosophy of policing. I plan to continue working on questions of just and legitimate policing in nonideal contexts. Policing raises questions of justice and legitimacy in the enforcement of rules that I take to be as important as, and perhaps more difficult than, classic questions of which rules and policies are just and legitimate. Given that enforcement has an unavoidable discretionary component, how do we get from just rules to just enforcement?
What is a text that has had a big impact on you that you'd recommend to students? I love reading pretty much anything from Hume. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a text I was assigned early in my philosophical career, and it has had a major impact on me. I find his essays, like “Of the Original Contract” or “On Suicide”, especially fun. Hume’s combination of philosophical insight and stylistic excellence makes for engaging reading that challenges your philosophical commitments.
What advice do you have for undergrads at USC? It is tempting as an undergrad to focus on one’s grades and professional prospects after graduation. That is good and important, but you’ve got an opportunity to explore new interests and to reflect on your basic philosophical commitments. Don’t waste the opportunity. Do the reading. Think carefully. Interrogate your beliefs and try on new views. You probably won’t have a similar opportunity in the future.
Jonathan Quong
How did you get into philosophy? I’ve been interested in politics for almost as long as I can remember. When I was an undergraduate, I was a political science major. But it became apparent that I was much more interested in political theory or philosophy than in anything else. I ended up going to Oxford to get my PhD, and I really got hooked on political philosophy there. In the first few weeks after I arrived, I attended a talk by the great G.A. Cohen where he gave his paper, “Freedom and Money”. I had never seen anything like this. I remember walking back from the talk with some other students. They were busy trying to figure out where Cohen’s argument went wrong. I remember thinking to myself: “You guys are nuts! There’s no point trying to figure out where the argument goes wrong. The argument is airtight. It doesn’t go wrong anywhere. I just want to learn how to do that!”
What is something you're working on? I’m working on something that seems puzzling to me: legitimate injustice. Most people think that laws in democratic societies like ours are sometimes unjust, but so long as the laws are passed by the appropriate procedures and aren’t gravely unjust, those laws can still be permissibly imposed and enforced by government officials. These are apparently cases of legitimate injustice. But it’s pretty strange to think a law can be unjust—that is, the law treats people unjustly or violates their rights—and yet still be permissibly enforced. Is there a good explanation of this phenomenon, or should we abandon the idea altogether?
Describe a course you teach at USC. I teach PHIL 174, “Freedom, Equality, and Social Justice”. What is a just society? This course introduces students to competing answers to this question. The course also engages with more specific policy questions, including, among others: Is there any sense in which wages in a free market economy can be unjust or exploitative? As citizens, are we under a special duty to obey the laws of our society?
What is your favorite philosophical text? I don’t have a single favorite but, following my answer to the first question, one of my favorites is certainly G.A. Cohen’s paper “Freedom and Money”. It had a big influence on me, and it’s a great example of how careful, precise work in philosophy can yield deep, important truths about politics (an electronic version is freely accessible to USC students as chapter 8 in Cohen’s book, On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy).
Jake Ross
What is a text you'd recommend to students? I'd recommend everything by Plato. Start with the Apology. Then read the Republic. Then read the Symposium.
What's a piece of pop-culture that you really like or really dislike? I dislike the vast majority popular music of the past half-century, because it is melodically and harmonically impoverished. Popular music fell into decline in the mid 70's and has never recovered.
What non-work things do you like to do? Walking in the sun.
What advice to you have for undergrads just starting out at USC? Avoid groupthink. Adopt a critical attitude toward everything you are taught. Keep in mind that, in many areas of academia, views become widely accepted not because they are supported by compelling evidence, but rather for entirely different reasons. For example, a view may be accepted because it advances certain interests, or because it makes people feel better about themselves. Sometimes, the views that are accepted for these reasons are so patently absurd that they would collapse under the slightest scrutiny. And yet they never receive this scrutiny because people are too afraid to question them. Don't be afraid. Question what you read and hear. And very often you may find that the emperor has no clothes.
Jeff Russell
What is something you're working on? What should you do when there is a small chance that your actions will have really huge effects? What should you believe when you can’t tell what information you have or what it supports? Are there material objects with fuzzy edges?
What is a text that has had a big impact on you? Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”
What is the strangest view you endorse? I at least lean toward each of these: There was a first millisecond when I became pretty tall. There are infinitely many material objects in exactly the same place as my body. There are vast infinities of objects that aren’t anywhere at all. There are eternal, immutable, objective moral truths.
Describe a course you teach at USC. Probability and Rational Choice! (PHIL 258) This course gives you tools for having beliefs that match the world better and making choices that accomplish your goals better. The tools come from psychology, economics, statistics, and philosophy. When you have them, you see how they matter for everything.
Mark Schroeder
What is something you're working on? I’m currently working on trying to show what philosophical theories about the nature of persons and personhood can teach us about misunderstandings and conflict in interpersonal relationships.
Describe a course you teach at USC. I often teach Phil 166: Current Moral and Social Issues. This is a fun course in which we find close and surprising connections between very different moral issues like abortion, self-defense, torture, wealth inequality, and the legacy of slavery. You’ll leave my class more self-critical about many of your own views and with a new set of tools for solving difficult problems.
What non-work things do you like to do? My kids occupy pretty much all of my time – especially during coronavirus home isolation.
What is the strangest view you endorse? I think that there are facts about what you ought to do, and you can know them, even though you know in advance that you will change your mind when you are better-informed. I also think that questions about who you are, what you are responsible for, and even what kinds of events you could survive are just questions about what would make for the best story about you.
What's a book you're planning to read soon? Jenn Lyons, “The Memory of Souls”.
What advice do you have for undergrads just starting out at USC? Find your own small community. USC is a big place, but it is full of smaller communities. Don’t let yourself end up drawn into only doing things that everyone else around you is doing.
Scott Soames
How did you get into philosophy? I took two introductory courses as a college sophomore. I found them challenging because I thought the great philosophers were on to something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I decided to stick around until I did – which has taken me awhile. My own answer to What is Philosophy? Is summed up in my latest book The World Philosophy Made.
What is something you are working on? I am currently writing a paper developing a theory of propositions (the primary bearers of truth and falsity and the things we assert and believe) inspired in part by Wittgenstein’s theory of elementary propositions in the Tractatus. I in addition, I am working on a key interpretive problem in the philosophy of law concerning in 14th Amendment jurisprudence in the United States, while also researching constitutional challenges raised by the modern administrative state.
Describe a course that you teach. The Chair of USC Economics and I have developed a new 100-level course we coteach: Free People, Free Thought and Free Markets
What is the strangest view you endorse? Thoughts – the things we think, believe, and know (which are called “propositions” in philosophy) -- are not mental pictures, images, sentences or symbolic forms. They are things we do – cognitive act or operation types.
What books are you planning to read soon? I am rereading books I enjoyed and learned from years ago. I am just finishing Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) and The Sun also Rises (Hemingway), and I am about to start Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and Franny and Zooey (J.D Salinger)
Jacob Soll
What is something you're working on? I just finished a heterodox history of free market thought. My goal was to understand something that I believed was a rather vague and loosely used term. I believe that to understand ideas, we must understand them in historical context, through uses, and long, ongoing conversations about the ideas, as they evolve through debate. I found that free market thought has deep roots in Ciceronian, agrarian Stoic philosophy, and in the commercial policies of France and England in the seventeenth century. The only way to understand Adam Smith is to read what he read, and read him in his context. He was a professor of Stoic moral philosophy. So it has been a winding and long seven years of research and writing. I think what I found is odd and surprising. That’s the beauty of reading a lot. You never really know what you will find.
What is a text you'd recommend to students? My favorite all-around author is probably the Stoic Roman historian Tacitus. His influence is outsized in Western history, and his Annals still is one of the most entertaining books out there. I recommend it to all. Especially these days. It’s about power, corruption, flattery, and virtue. I also believe that literature is a great source of philosophy. I recommend that students read Tolstoy. One certainly does not have to agree with him, but I’m interested in what students think about Tolstoy’s approach to philosophy. Try Jane Austen too, or any 19th-century author. They all mixed philosophy with grand story-telling. The nineteenth-century and pre-WWII novel, and its various current incarnations, stands to me as one of the great achievements of the human mind.
Tell us a story from when you were a student. When I was a student, it was cool to study the humanities. Everyone was trying to be the best poet, historian, literary critic and philosopher. Times change. You never know what awaits you, which is why traditional Stoic and Machiavellian prudence is a truly great and useful philosophy.
Describe a course you teach at USC. I just taught an advanced seminar on the history of free market thought. It was a really fun course. The students were amazing. I learned a lot. We read a bunch of amazing texts from Aristotle and Cicero to Smith. I would like to teach a course on concepts of the state before 1800. You won’t find any libertarians. We can ask, historically, why that is.
Gabriel Uzquiano
How did you get into Philosophy? One of the courses I took in high school covered the history of philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Kant. I continued to read philosophy as an undergraduate, mostly history and continental philosophy in the first year or two. That is when I discovered logic and the thrill that came with being able to settle a substantive question, and I began to take every formal course I could lay eyes on for the remainder of my degree. Formal methods turned out to be very helpful for my further development as a philosopher, but with time, I learned that they are no substitute for philosophical reflection on traditional philosophical problems. They are nevertheless part of how I approach philosophical questions.
What is something you're working on? I’m interested in the limitations logic seems to place on thought and language. I have been perplexed by the fact, for example, that some elusive thoughts cannot be entertained, on pain of contradiction, unless some other thought is entertained as well. Or the fact that some thoughts are such that the thought that they are such-and-such is one and the same, on pain of contradiction, as the thought that some other propositions are such-and-such. In metaphysics, I have been concerned with the question of how some objects can make up another object. There are different ways in which this may happen. Some objects may form a whole of which they are parts; they may compose a set of which they are elements; or they may even make up a social group of which they are members. These forms of composition appear to be governed by different rules and principles, and they each give rise to its own set of questions. At the moment, I’m interested in the question of whether some of these modes of composition can be reduced to one another.
Describe a course you teach at USC. Two courses I teach regularly are PHIL 222g: Logic and Language, and PHIL 452: Modal Logic. Logic is a central tool in philosophy, both for the general purpose of characterizing of the distinction between valid and invalid arguments and for purposes of clarifying central concepts in the study of thought and language. My courses touch on both aspects of logic but with more of a focus on their applications for the study of language than is perhaps common in other logic courses. PHIL 222g is an introduction to logic with emphasis on how the formal framework can illuminate such central issues in language as the nature of meaning and communication or the nature of truth. PHIL 452 is a more advanced course where we introduce a formal framework for the study of modality and we look at an array of philosophical applications in language and epistemology.
What non-work things do you like to do? I’m not sure whether this qualifies as non-work, but I like logical puzzles and riddles and I can spend an inordinate amount of time with them. That is certainly what I happened when I wrote “How to solve the hardest logic problem ever in two questions?” If you are curious, you can find George Boolos’ presentation of the puzzle with his original three question solution in Chapter 29 of his collected papers Logic, Logic, and Logic. Brian Rabern has recently posted a great You Tube video with another presentation of the puzzle and its solution.
Other than that, I like the outdoors, and as an avid FC Barcelona supporter, I make every effort to watch every game I can.
What is a text that has had a big impact on you? George Boolos has been very influential in my career, and I very much enjoy the playful style of his Logic, Logic, and Logic, especially Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable.
Ralph Wedgwood
How did you get into Philosophy? As an undergraduate at Oxford, I didn’t take any Philosophy courses at all. I just studied Classics and German Studies. But I had some close friends at Oxford who were studying Philosophy – including Alexander Bird, who is now a distinguished philosopher of science in the UK – and I started talking to them about what they were studying, and eventually got hooked!
What is something you're working on? One thing that I’m working on is rationality – I’m trying to work out a theory of rational belief and rational choice. After that, I want to work out an approach to ethics which is based on the idea that ethics is all about values (about what is good or bad in various ways), but rejects the so-called “consequentialist” assumption that ethics is just about “making the world as a whole a better place”.
Describe a course you teach at USC. One of my courses is a 400-level class on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. This covers a lot of Plato’s works, including the whole of his greatest masterpiece, The Republic.
What's a book you're planning to read soon? I am planning to write an article on the ethical theory of the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, and so one book that I’m planning to read soon is John Cooper’s book, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton, 2012).