The Department of Philosophy at Berkeley offers extensive opportunities to pursue questions about politics, law, and their moral and normative foundations. The Department supports one of the leading PhD programs in philosophy in the United States, with a faculty whose interests extend to all parts of philosophy and its history. The culture of the department is supportive of interdisciplinary projects, and faculty and students have extensive connections with Berkeley scholars in psychology, neuroscience, mathematics and logic, as well as law and political theory. Faculty whose interests are especially relevant to the philosophical study of law, politics, and morality include Niko Kolodny, Véronique Munoz-Dardé, and R. Jay Wallace. The Department has one of the strongest placement records among philosophy Ph.D programs in the English-speaking world; recent graduates working in the areas of moral and political philosophy and philosophy of law now hold tenure-track or tenured positions at UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Toronto, Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
For admissions information about the Philosophy Ph.D, please visit here.
Recent dissertations in the general areas of moral and political philosophy and philosophy of law are:
Jeffrey Kaplan, Weightless Normativity: A Theory of Law, Language, and More
Julian Jonker, In Defense of Directed Duties
Erin Beeghly: Seeing Difference: The Ethics and Epistemology of Stereotyping
Erich Hatala Matthes, Engaging with the Past: Essays on History, Value, and Practical Reason
Brian Berkey, Against Moderate Morality: The Demands of Justice in an Unjust World
Julia Nefsky, The Morality of Collective Harm
Benjamin Boudreaux, Recent Immigration and the Nation: An Account of the Demands of Immigration
Andy Engen, The Reactive Theory of Punishment
George Tsai, Moral Judgment and Historical Understanding
Agnes Callard, An Incomparabilist Account of Akrasia
Niko Kolodny, Relationships as Reasons