Malte Willer is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College. He received his graduate training at the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote his dissertation Modality in Flux under the direction of Nicholas Asher and Josh Dever. Before that, he studied philosophy, logic and theory of science at LMU Munich and at Oxford University.
His main area of interest is philosophy of language and philosophical logic, and specifically the dynamic perspective on discourse and reasoning. He has published on epistemic and deontic modals as well on conditionals and on the language of morals, and is currently thinking about agentive modals and problems surrounding subjective language and thought. In 2016 he was among the recipients of the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Selected Publications
"Lessons from Sobel Sequences," forthcoming in Semantics and Pragmatics
"Simplifying with Free Choice,” Topoi 37(3): 379–392, 2018
"Advice for Noncognitivists," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98(S1): 174–207, 2017
"Subjective Attitudes and Counterstance Contingency" (with Chris Kennedy), Proceedings of SALT XXVI
"Dynamic Foundations for Deontic Logic," in: Deontic Logic, edited by Nate Charlow and Matthew Chrisman, 324-354. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
“Dynamic Thoughts on Ifs and Oughts,” Philosophers’ Imprint 14(28): 1–30, 2014
"Dynamics of Epistemic Modality," Philosophical Review 122(1): 45-92, 2013
"A Remark on Iffy Oughts," Journal of Philosophy 109(7): 449-461, 2012
"Realizing What Might Be," Philosophical Studies 153(3): 365-375, 2011
"New Surprises for the Ramsey Test," Synthese 176(2): 291-309, 2010
Recent Courses
PHIL 59950 Job Placement Workshop
Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.
This workshop is open only to PhD Philosophy graduate students planning to go on the job market in the Autumn of 2019. Approval of dissertation committee is required.
PHIL 20100/30000 Elementary Logic
An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.
PHIL 59950 Job Placement Workshop
Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.
This workshop is open only to PhD Philosophy graduate students planning to go on the job market in the Autumn of 2018. Approval of dissertation committee is required.
For full list of Malte Willer's courses back to the 2012-13 academic year, see our searchable course database.