Brandon Hopkins’ Homepage

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PhD Candidate, Philosophy
UC Davis

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My interest in philosophy has mainly been in formal stuff. My MA thesis at San Francisco State University 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 tend to think 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 growing interest in hyperintensional semantic frameworks in modal logic, in the deontic case there are still strong reasons to favor more traditional, non‑hyperintensional semantics. 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 that 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 about how I procrastinate.