The University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • Philosophy at UMass

    Our department has a long and distinguished history of producing cutting-edge research and academic excellence. Our community includes scholars at all levels who engage with each other and the world outside to produce philosophy that is rigorous and meaningful. We believe the skills acquired through philosophical training at the college level are valuable whatever one's ultimate career turns out to be.

  • Why philosophy?

    Whatever your career aspirations, the study of philosophy can help in strengthening your preparation, through developing your capacities to think and reason well, to deal critically and analytically with the ideas, the concepts, the problems, and the methodologies central to your chosen profession. Yet the study of philosophy equips you not just with skills for a trade or profession; it equips you with an important skill for living. 

    You can learn more about the philosophy major here.

News

Jorati's latest book out with Oxford University Press

November 27, 2023

Julia Jorati's latest book, Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century, is hot off the press: ...

In Memory of Larry Foster

July 07, 2023

Lawrence (Larry) Foster, who was once a faculty member in the Philosophy Department at UMass Amherst, and later became a long-serving member and chair of the Philosophy Department at UMass Boston,...

Chen to join USC

April 07, 2023

Lu Chen (PhD 2020), currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Koç University, has accepted an offer from the Department of Philosophy at USC, where she will start in January 2024. ...

More News »

Julia Jorati, Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford.

Ernesto V. Garcia, “Pure and Impure Philosophy in Kant’s Metaphilosophy”. Kantian Journal.

Phil Bricker, Review of Dorr et al., The Bounds of Possibility: Puzzles of Modal Variation. Journal of Philosophy.

Hilary Kornblith, “Where Does Moral Knowledge Come From?”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Louise Antony and Ernesto V. Garcia, “Ethical Naturalism: Problems and Prospects.” In Bloomfield and Copp (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Realism.

David Turon, “Doing Harm While Allowing It: Towards a New Framework for the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing”. Philosophers Imprint.

Eleonore Neufeld, Guillermo Del Pinal, et al., “Asymmetry Effects in Generic and Quantified Generalizations”. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Peter Graham, “Must We Turn the Trolley?” In Lillehammer (ed.), The Trolley Problem.

Ned Markosian, “The Growing Block, The Epistemic Objection, and Zombie Parrots.” Disputatio.

Christopher Meacham, “The Nomic Likelihood Account of Laws.” Ergo.

Chaeyoung Paek, “Making Things Collectively.” Metaphysics.

Ernesto V. Garcia, “Bringing Public Reason into the Philosophy Classroom.” Teaching Ethics.

Moisés Macías Bustos et al., “Understanding Defective Theories: The case of Quantum Mechanics and non-individuality.” In Arenhart and Arroyo (eds.), Non-Reflexive Logics, Non-Individuals, and the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics.

Julia Jorati, “Slavery, Freedom, and Human Value in Early Modern Philosophy.” In Buss and Theunissen (eds.), Rethinking the Value of Humanity.

Ned Markosian, “Five New Arguments for The Dynamic Theory of Time.” Philosophical Perspectives.

Joe Levine, “Cognitive Phenomenology: Accessibility vs. Acquaintance.” In Weisberg (ed.), Qualitative Consciousness: Themes from the Philosophy of David Rosenthal.

Ernesto V. Garcia, “Rethinking Acts of conscience: Personal Integrity, Civility, and the Common Good”. Philosophy.

Ernesto V. Garcia, “Three Rival Versions of Kantian Constructivism”. Kant Yearbook.

Joe Levine, “The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Acquaintance”. ProtoSociology.

Sophie Horowitz, “Higher Order Evidence”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Guillermo Del Pinal, “The Logicality of Language: Contextualism versus Semantic Minimalism”. Mind.

Guillermo Del Pinal, “Probabilistic semantics for epistemic modals: Normality assumptions, conditional epistemic spaces and the strength of must and might”. Linguistics and Philosophy.

Ernesto V. Garcia, “Intuitions in 21st-Century Moral Philosophy: Why Ethical Intuitionism and Reflective Equilibrium Need Each Other. Discipline Filosofiche.

Alejandro Pérez Carballo, “Downwards Propriety in Epistemic Utility Theory”. Mind.

Emelia Miller, “Well-Being Monism Defended”. Journal of Happiness Studies.

Eleonore Neufeld, “Psychological essentialism and the structure of concepts.” Philosophy Compass.

Hilary Kornblith, “What Does Logic Have to Do With Justified Belief?: Why Doxastic Justification is Fundamental.” In Silva and Oliveira (eds.), Propositional and Doxastic Justification. Routledge.

Ned Markosian, “Meaning in Life and the Nature of Time.” In Landau (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Meaning in Life. Oxford.

Christopher Meacham, “Utilitarianism, Altruism, and Consent”. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.

Hilary Kornblith, “Epistemic Justification and Reflection.” Analysis.

Ernesto Garcia, “Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics.” In Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Springer

Justin Mooney et al., “Probing the Mind of God: Divine Beliefs and Credences.” Religious Studies.

Julia Jorati, “Leibniz on Divine Causation: Continuous Creation and Concurrence Without Occasionalism.” In Ganssle (ed.), Philosophical Essays on Divine Causation. Routledge

Kevin Klement, “Logical Form and the Development of Russell’s Logicism.” In Boccuni and Sereni (eds.), Origins and Varieties of Logicism: On the Logico-Philosophical Foundations of Mathematics. Routledge.

Cruz Davis, “Structural Humility.” Philosophy of Science.

Hilary Kornblith, Scientific Epistemology: An Introduction. Oxford.

Sophie Horowitz, “Shrinking three arguments for conditionalization.” Philosophical Perspectives.

Tim Juvshik, “Artifactualization without Physical Modification,” Res Philosophica.

Justin Mooney, “Becoming a Statue.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

Christopher Meacham, “Arbitrariness and Uniqueness.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Justis Koon, “The Epistemology of Evolutionary Debunking.” Synthese.

Thomas Morrison, “Foucault’s Elephant.” Philosophy Now!

Joe Levine, “The Mind-Body Relation: Problem, Mystery, or What?” In Allot et al (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky.

Tim Juvshik, “Artifacts and Mind-Dependence.” Synthese.

Julia Jorati (ed.), Powers: A History. Oxford.

Louise Antony, “Bias.” In Hall and Ásta (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy.

Julia Jorati, “Moral Necessity, Agent Causation, and the Determination of Free Actions in Clarke and Leibniz.” In Hausmann and Noller (eds.), Free Will: Historical and Analytic Perspectives.

Vanessa de Harven, “The Metaphysics of Stoic Corporealism.” Apeiron.

Julia Jorati, “The Guise of the Good in Leibniz.” Philosophical Explorations.

Louise Antony, “Naturalism and ’Robust’ Subjectivity: a Critique of Baker.” In Oliveira et al. (eds.), Common Sense Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Lynne Rudder Baker.

Joe Levine, “On Baker on the First-Person.” In Oliveira et al. (eds.), Common Sense Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Lynne Rudder Baker.

Tim Juvshik, “Function Essentialism about Artifacts.” Philosophical Studies.

Ned Markosian, “The Dynamic Theory of Time and Time Travel to the Past.” Disputatio.

Ned Markosian et al., “Time.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Julia Jorati, “The Correspondence with Arnauld.” In Lodge and Strickland (eds.), Leibniz’s Key Philosophical Writings.

Tim Juvshik, “Good ‘Cat’, Bad ‘Act’.” Philosophia.

Justin Mooney, “How God Knows Counteractuals of Freedom.” Faith and Philosophy.

David Turon, Counterfactuals and double prevention: Trouble for the Causal Independence thesis. Thought.

Louise Antony, “What is Naturalism?Think.

Pete Graham, “‘Secondary Permissibility’ and the Ethics of Harm.” Journal of Moral Philosophy.

Joe Levine, “A Posteriori Physicalism: Type-B Materialism and the Explanatory Gap.” In Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Concsiousness.

Sophie Horowitz et al., “Dilating and Contracting Arbitrarily.” Noûs.

Patrick Grafton-Cardwell, “How to Understand the Completion of Art.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

Phillip Bricker, Modal Matters. Oxford.

Hilary Kornblith, “Naturalism, Psychologism, Relativism.” In Ashton et al. (eds.), Social Epistemology and Relativism.

Louise Antony, “Feminism Without Metaphysics: A Deflationary Account of Gender“. Erkenntnis.

Elle Benjamin et al., “Representation Is Never Perfect, But Are Parents Even Representatives?.” American Journal of Bioethics.

Louise Antony, “Not rational, but not brutely causal either: a reply to Fodor on concept acquisition.” Theoria.

Christopher Meacham, “Difference Minimizing Theory.” Ergo.

Peter Graham, “Two Arguments for Objectivism about Moral Permissibility.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

Alejandro Pérez Carballo, “Conceptual Evaluation: Epistemic.” In Burgess et al. (eds.), Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics.

Christopher Meacham, “Too much of a good thing: decision-making in cases with infinitely many utility contributions.” Synthese.

Lu Chen, “Infinitesimal Gunk.” Journal of Philosophical Logic.

Justin Mooney, “An Episodic Account of Divine Personhood.” Religious Studies.

Christopher Meacham, “Deference and Uniqueness.” Philosophical Studies.

Julia Jorati, “Leibniz on Slavery and the Ownership of Human Beings.” Journal of Modern Philosophy.

Justin Mooney, “How To Solve The Problem Of Evil: A Deontological Strategy.” Faith and Philosophy.

Haoying Liu, “Of Integrated Information Theory: A Philosophical Evaluation.” Philosophical Psychology.

Patrick Grafton-Cardwell, “Debugging the Case for Creationism.” Philosophical Studies.

Joseph Levine, “Consciousness is Acquaintance and Acquaintance is Consciousness.” In Knowles and Raleigh (eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays

Sophie Horowitz, “Predictably Misleading Evidence.” In Skipper and Steglich-Petersen (eds.), Higher Order Evidence: New Essays

Kevin Klement, “Grundgesetze and the Sense/Reference Distinction.” In Ebert and Rossberg (eds.), Essays on Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic.

Sophie Horowitz, “The Truth Problem for Permissivism.” Journal of Philosophy.

Kevin Klement, “New Logic and the Seeds of Analytic Philosophy: Boole, Frege.” In Shand (ed.), A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy.

Justin Mooney, “Multilocation Without Time Travel.” Erkenntnis.

Justin Mooney, “Self-Colocation: A Colocation Puzzle for Endurantists.” Synthese.

Alejandro Pérez Carballo, “Negation, Expressivism, and Intentionality.” Philosophical Quarterly.

Peter Graham, “Avoidable Harm.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Phil Bricker. “Composition as identity, Leibniz’s Law, and slice-sensitive emergent properties.” Synthese.

Joe Levine. "On Phenomenal Access". In Pautz and Stoljar (eds), Blockheads!.

Lu Chen. “Do simple infinitesimal parts solve Zeno’s paradox of measure?Synthese.

Peter Graham, “An Argument for Objective Possibilism.” Ergo.

Hilary Kornblith. Second Thoughts and the Epistemological Enterprise. Cambridge University Press.

Ned Markosian. “Sideways music.” Analysis.

Justin Mooney. “From a cosmic fine-tuner to a perfect being.” Analysis.

Joe Levine. “Bruteness and Supervenience: Mind vs. Morality.” In Mekios and Vintiadis (eds.), Brute Facts.

Vanessa de Harven. “The Resistance to Stoic Blending.” Rhizomata.

Joe Levine. Review of Brian Loar, Consciousness and Meaning: Selected Essays, Katalin Balog and Stephanie Beardman (eds.), NDPR.

Kevin Klement, “Russell’s Logicism” In Wahl (ed.) The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell.

Complete list of recent publications