Brandon Hopkins' Homepage

PhD Candidate, Philosophy
UC Davis

email address

About

My interest in philosophy has mainly been in formal stuff. My MA thesis at SFSU was a study of how mathematical language might be seen to "evolve". At Davis I've focused mostly on logic and the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and analytic metaphysics. Most of my work at Davis has ended up becoming an exercise in formal semantics, which is where I usually end up thinking most of the action is.

From thinking about bridge principles and the nature of normativity more generally, I have within the last couple of years taken a keen interest in deontic logic, with a special interest in logics of conditional obligation, and especially semantics for such logics. I've been surprised to discover that, although there is a broad movement away from possible-worlds semantics in modal logic—in favor of hyperintensional semantic frameworks—at least in the case of deontic logic, there are still relatively strong reasons to favor non-hyperintensional semantic frameworks. I've also been surprised at the variety of ways in which metaethical considerations can show up in the model theory, and at how many opportunities there still are for metaethicists and semanticists to cooperate over model theory. Things along these lines are some of the deeper themes of my dissertation, which I expect to defend within the next couple of years.

For a more detailed picture of my academic history, my CV is here. Much more of it is hyperlinked and clickable than you would expect; clicking the titles of my articles and presentations will take you to PDFs, and clicking names will take you to homepages. It's basically a webpage in its own right, but which doubles as my actual CV. I also keep a profile at PhilPeople, although it's quite sparse.

I am an active member of the LLEMMMa Working Group at UC Davis, and also the maintainer of its homepage.

For more about my quasi-extracurricular interests, see here for some potentially interesting stuff on LaTeX, and here for some potentially interesting stuff on computing in general.