Tamler Sommers
Assistant Professor
- Phone: (713)743-3032
- Email: tssommers@uh.edu
- Office: 504 Agnes Arnold Hall
Tamler Sommers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston, and holds a joint appointment with the Honor’s College. He teaches primarily in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, specializing in issues relating to free will and moral responsibility. His current research project examines differences in perspectives about moral responsibility across cultures and what these differences mean for the philosophical debate. A book on this topic entitled Relative Justice is under contract with Princeton University Press. Recent publications include “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor” (Biology and Philosophy), “More Work for Hard Incompatibilism” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), and “The Objective Attitude” (Philosophical Quarterly). Sommers also contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement and conducts interviews for The Believer. A collection of his interviews, entitled A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, has just been published by McSweeney’s Press.
Education
- Ph.D. in Philosophy, Duke University (2005)
- B.A. in English, University of Pennsylvania (1992)
Selected Publications
- “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will.” Philosophy Compass. Forthcoming.
- “More Work for Hard Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
LXXIX No. 3: 511-521. November, 2009.
- “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor.”
Biology and Philosophy. 24,1 (2009):35-50. - “The Objective Attitude.” The Philosophical Quarterly. 57, 28 (2007): 321-342
- “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves.” In Distributed Cognition and the Will, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid, Don Ross, Lynn Stephens (eds). MIT Press. 2007.
- “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life,” (with Alex Rosenberg). Biology and Philosophy. 18: 653-668. November 2003.
- “Of Zombies, Color Scientists, and Floating Iron Bars,” Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness 8(22). November 2002
