Selim Berker

Research Interests: Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics

Selim Berker is Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in the Department of Philosophy. A lapsed physicist, Berker started his graduate training in physics before switching to philosophy, eventually receiving a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2007 from MIT, where Judy Thomson was his primary advisor. Since then he has taught at Harvard. He works on the foundations of normativity in all of its guises, including the normative assessment of action (in ethics), of belief (in epistemology), and—increasingly—of emotion (in moral psychology and aesthetics). He is also interested in more general issues in metaphysics connected to grounding, explanation, and dependence, often—but not always—with an eye toward their application in normative contexts.