Mark Berger

Mark Berger
Collegiate Assistant Professor
Gates-Blake 405
773.702.8673

Mark Berger received his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University in 2015.  He has previously taught Contemporary Civilization as a Core Preceptor at Columbia University.  His work investigates the intersection of Ethics and Political Philosophy, most especially different conceptions of value pluralism.  His dissertation, Genuine Value Pluralism and the Foundations of Liberalism, articulates and defends a vision of liberal political theory grounded in genuine value pluralism.  Value pluralism, it argues, is best understood as a thesis about the nature of values, not as an observation about the diversity of evaluative beliefs that individuals hold.  It should be understood as the claim that values themselves are plural and not all mutually realizable in a single life.  Accepting this account of value pluralism offers significant challenges to traditional liberal political theories.  However, value pluralism also has wide-ranging, and often surprising, advantages in explaining key tenets of liberal political theory.