Will Cailes
Graduate Research Assistant
Ph.D. Student, Department of Philosophy
Kyle Kirby
Graduate Research Assistant
Ph.D. Student, Department of Philosophy
Danilo Linhares
Graduate Research Assistant
My main interests lie in metaethics, the philosophy of language, and the law.
Samuel Mattingly
Graduate Research Assistant
I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Arizona. Although I am interested in a lot of things, I am currently most focused on political philosophy and ethics. Before coming to Tucson, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia and received my B.A. in philosophy from the University of Virginia.
Jyoti Nayak
Graduate Research Assistant
Ph.D. Student, Department of Philosophy
David Poplar
Graduate Research Assistant
I’m a fourth year Ph.D. student, primarily interested in the applied aspects of philosophy and the ways it can actively engage with the world through informing and impacting people’s lives, shaping social and political policy, and to a lesser extent, helping me understand what my dog is thinking. My primary interests include philosophy of law (particularly criminal law), political philosophy, and applied ethics. I am also fascinated with epistemology, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of humor, although there is little apart from golf and reality TV that doesn’t interest me.
Tianzhe Shen
Graduate Research Assistant
Ph.D. Student, Department of Philosophy
Seth Jacob Sowalskie
Graduate Research Assistant
I’m Seth Sowalskie. I grew up in Frisco, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, and earned a B.S. from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2019, where I double majored in American Politics and Philosophy. I wrote my thesis there on how John Stuart Mill’s theory of political development could help explain public opinion trends towards marijuana legalization. I then commissioned as a United States Army officer and served on active duty for five years, primarily at Fort Carson, Colorado. I also deployed to Poland in 2022.
My research interests are primarily in political philosophy and ethics, with secondary interests in free will, philosophy of religion, and just war theory. I am particularly interested in studying what our moral obligations are in a political society and what role the state has to play in promoting that behavior, if any.
In my free time, I enjoy hiking (especially the Colorado 14ers), reading, concerts (ranging from opera to metalcore), cooking, mixology, and spending time with my family, friends, and church.
Lenin Vazquez-Toledo
Graduate Research Assistant
I’m Lenin (first name) Eduardo (middle name) Vazquez-Toledo (last name). I’m a third-year PhD student at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Arizona. I got my BA in Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in June 2019. I am also a Marymount School alumni.
I do work mainly on metaphysics, particularly topics in higher-order metaphysics and metametaphysics. My BA thesis was on pluralism about being, the view that there are many ways of being. I also specialise in logic, the philosophy of art, and the philosophy of psychiatry. I am interested in default logic, the philosophy of music, and theories of mental illness and explanation in psychiatry. I have taught the courses ‘Minds, Matter, and God’, ‘Philosophy of Psychiatry’, and ‘Logical and Critical Thinking’, as well as a range of ethics courses.
I love opera (from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde to Gilbert & Sullivan operas), cycling, and knitting, and I do some amateur classical singing.
Henry K. Weiss
Graduate Research Assistant
Henry is a first-year PhD student originally from Washington, D.C. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts; and his M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His first philosophical love was the philosophy of mind, but more recently he has become interested in philosophical approaches to questions about the structure of society: what sorts of institutions are most likely to promote good governance? what are the conditions (if any) under which a society can achieve something approaching group equality? In thinking about these questions, Henry has become increasingly interested in naturalistic accounts of belief formation, which he thinks have something important to teach us about the doxastic and thus ideological possibility space available to large-scale human societies. In his spare time, Henry enjoys long walks with a podcast, discovering obscure R&B albums, drinking fancy tea, and thrifting.
