Brandon Hopkins’ Homepage
PhD Candidate, Philosophy
UC Davis
I’m a modal logician and philosopher of logic, working mainly on the semantics of non‑normal modal logics, especially conditional ones. The application I care most about is deontic logic, the logic of obligation and permission, and in particular conditional obligation.
The systems I work in are non‑normal but classical: weaker than the normal modal logics, but still bound to respect classical logical equivalence. My own view is that the classical paradigm is the right home for deontic logic, and my dissertation asks how far it can actually be carried, against the recent pulls toward non‑classicality and hyperintensionality.
This work also has a computational side. I formalize some of these systems in Isabelle/HOL, machine-checking how their axioms and semantics line up, and ultimately their completeness (an early version is here); further out, I’m drawn to formalizing not just deontic logics but actual normative codes, so that LLMs can reason about them through theorem provers. In practice these codes are read classically, and even that is hard enough to make fully rigorous.
I also think about how models mediate between theories and phenomena—in deontic logic, where metaethical commitments can quietly surface in the semantics, and in science, where it becomes a question of modeling. More broadly, I keep longstanding interests in the philosophy of mathematics, the automation of scientific inference, and analytic metaphysics, among others.
I’ve taught logic, critical thinking, and scientific inference, and have done much of the recent development and consolidation of the department’s introductory logic courses, especially their interactive Carnap.io exercises. A big part of my motivation is to lead students into the philosophy minor and its emphasis in logic.
I’m an active member of the LLEMMMa Working Group at UC Davis, and also the maintainer of its homepage and GitHub repositories.
For a fuller picture, my CV is here. It’s more clickable than most: article and talk titles link to PDFs, and names to homepages, so it doubles as a webpage in its own right. I also keep a (fairly sparse) profile at PhilPeople.
Some of my procrastinations are collected here, if you’d like to have a look.