Travis Timmerman , Ph.D.
Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
(973) 761-9480
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Travis Timmerman, Ph.D.
Chair and Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
Professor Timmerman's main research interests are in normative ethics, applied ethics, and the philosophy of death. In normative ethics, he primarily focuses on the actualism/possibilism debate and axiological issues concerning the concept of "harm." Recent work includes "Probabilism" in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association (2024, co-authored with Yishai Cohen) and "The Negative Impact on Well-Being Account of Harm" forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Harm. In applied ethics, he has written on animal welfare, global poverty, and the ethics of Confederate monuments. Recent publications include the co-authored book "Weighing Animal Welfare," published by Oxford University Press (2024). In the philosophy of death, he primarily focuses on issues related to the question of whether death can be bad for the person who dies and fitting attitudes toward death. Recent publications include “Is Temporal Bias Key to Solving Fischer’s Asymmetry?” in Freedom, Responsibility, and Value: Essays in Honor of John Martin Fischer (Routledge, 2023) and “Constraint-Free Meaning, Fearing Death, and Temporal Bias" in Journal of Ethics (2022). He is currently working on a book on the philosophy of death, under contract with Oxford University Press.
Education
- Ph.D. in Philosophy, Syracuse University
- M.A. in Philosophy, Syracuse University
- M.A. in Political Science, Arizona State University
- B.S. in Political Science and B.A. in Philosophy, Arizona State University
Accomplishments
- Recipient of $40,000 grant from Open Philanthropy to develop a course on longtermism, titled Longtermism: Past, Present, and Future.
- Researcher for the Moral Weight Project at Rethink Priorities (January 2022 - May 2023)
- A&S Research of the Year 2020
- Recipient of $10,000 University Research Council Grant to for work on the actualism/possibilism debate in ethics.
- Recipient of $6,000 National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Grant for his project Accounting for Moral Responsibility in an Agent's Free Actions.
- Co-recipient (with Ben Bradley and Kirsten Egerstrom) of $93,849 Immortality Project Grant for our project Death, Rational Emotion, and Meaningfulness
- Executive Committee member of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying (IAPDD)