Epistemology and Metaphysics
The core philosophical areas of epistemology and metaphysics are well represented in the intellectual life of the UCSD Philosophy Department. These areas lie at the center of the research of several of our faculty members; specifically, our faculty are actively researching such diverse metaphysical topics as free will, Humean supervenience, laws, spacetime, color, the self, reduction, modality, properties, natural kinds, truth, and causation, and epistemological issues including empirical knowledge, explanation, the nature of perception, evidence, and rationality. Of course, faculty members also teach a diverse selection of graduate and undergraduate courses and supervise dissertations in these areas.

Some of the epistemological and metaphysical research carried out in the Department connects with issues in philosophy of science and cognitive science, and is enhanced by the Department's connections with the UCSD Science Studies Program and the UCSD Department of Cognitive Science (philosophy graduate students have the option of applying to do interdisciplinary degrees with either of these programs), as well as the Philosophy Department's less formal connections with other UCSD departments including linguistics, physics, math, psychology, and so on.

Faculty

Paul Churchland is currently at work on a new book entitled, Inner Spaces & Outer Spaces: The New Epistemology, which addresses a wide range of entirely traditional epistemological issues from the emerging perspective of the several sciences of the brain. The aim is to exploit the striking advances recently made, in our understanding of the architecture and activities of the physical brain, to illuminate, to reformulate, and to solve, a broad range of classical epistemological problems. The metaphysics is materialistic, and the epistemology is naturalistic.

Craig Callender has written in various areas of metaphysics, including the nature of time, Humean supervenience, and objective probability. He also teaches on topics such as time, causation, laws of nature and natural kinds.

Nancy Cartwright's principal interests are philosophy and history of science (especially physics and economics), causal inference and objectivity in science. Her publications include How the Laws of Physics Lie (1983), Nature's Capacities and their Measurement (1989), Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics [co-author] (1995), and The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (1999).

Jonathan Cohen is especially interested in the metaphysics of color properties; part of the interest of this topic is that it may shed light on the metaphysics of other sorts of properties (e.g., aesthetic, moral) that philosophers have found difficulty accommodating within a materialist conception of the world. He has also published on such topics as explanation, the metaphysics of information, the epistemological properties of photographs vis a vis other kinds of depictive representations, and the metaphysics of representation.

Rick Grush's primary interest is understanding the mind and the nature of mental representation, as well as the physically implemented information processing mechanisms that make them possible. His large front burner has been occupied with with our capacity to represent space and time, and he is currently working on a book on this topic, tentatively titled Spatiotemporal Representation. His small front burner has the nature of subjectivity, and its relation to egocentric spatial and temporal representation, simmering quietly. He approaches these issues from philosophical, historical, and scientific standpoints.

Dana Nelkin's work on free will often leads her into both metaphysical and epistemological issues. For example, she is interested in the relationship between freedom, determinism, and mechanism, and in our limits and commitments as rational agents. She is also interested in a constellation of epistemological issues that she has begun to explore in "Rationality, Knowledge, and the Lottery Paradox."

Gila Sher's research centers on epistemology and metaphysics. The main issues she is working on are: epistemic friction and epistemic freedom, foundations without foundationalism (foundational holism), a neo-Quinean model of knowledge, a substantivist approach to truth, the unity and diversity of truth, moderate pluralism of correspondence principles, the foundational problem of logic, logic and reality, structuralism in logic and mathematics, formality as an ontological notion.

Eric Watkins works primarily on Kant's metaphysical and epistemological views. His recent book, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (Cambridge University Press, 2005) considers the complex issue of causality in Kant and his predecessors, but also how Kant's views are relevant to several contemporary contexts (such as discussions about the laws of nature, the nature of events, and agency-theory). He is presently focussing more on questions in epistemology: (1) In what way might sensations be relevant to justifying (empirical) knowledge (without falling prey to the so-called "myth of the given")? (2) Is there justification for thinking that we can know only how reality appears to us and not reality itself? (3) Could we know that we are free in a fundamental respect (despite the apparent hold of determinism)?

Christian Wüthrich works on issues in the metaphysics of science, particularly in the ontology of space and time. He also dabbles in persistence, causation, identity, and modality, mostly in relation to extant and historical theories in the physical sciences.

Recent Graduate Seminars in Epistemology and Metaphysics

Philosophy of Space, Time, and Spacetime
Special Topics: Color
Humean Supervenience
Evidence
The History of Analytic Philosophy
Self and Subject in 17th and 18th Century Philosophy
Leibniz: Mathematics and Nature
Evidence
The Nature of Logic
Kantian Epistemology
Vagueness
Information
Epistemology
The Metaphysics of the Quantum World
Direction of Time
Recent Theses in Epistemology and Metaphysics

Mark Newman, Structural Realism (2006)
Greg Shirley, Heidegger and the Philosophy of Logic (2006)
P. D. Magnus, Underdetermination and the Claims of Science (2004)
Matt Kisner, Descartes' Naturalistic Rationalism (2004) Paul Gatto, Communal Knowledge in a Holistic World: The Inherited
Relationship Between Epistemology and Semantics (2003)
Laura Perinni, Visual Representations and Scientific Knowledge (2002)
Joseph Ramsey, Expertise and Mixture in Automated Causal Discovery (2001)
David Danks, The Epistemology of Causal Judgment (2001)
Evan Tiffany, A Naturalistic Account of Normativity (2000)
Reading Groups

In addition to these courses, epistemological and metaphysical issues loom large in several of the department's ad hoc reading groups, which provide opportunities for philosophical discussion in a less structured setting. Recent reading groups that have concerned themselves with matters epistemological/metaphysical have revolved around works including McDowell's Mind and World, Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits, and Williams's Truth and Truthfulness. In addition, the Department's Experimental Philosophy Lab often devotes its weekly discussion to epistemological and metaphysical topics.

Conferences

Recent conferences on epistemological and metaphysical topics held at UCSD include:
Society for Exact Philosophy, 18-21 May 2006
Color Perception: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives, 11-12 October 2002