Julia Staffel
ICS Affiliated Faculty • Associate Professor
Philosophy

Julia Staffel (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2013) joined CU Boulder's department of philosophy in Fall 2018. Prior to coming to Boulder, she worked at Washington University in St. Louis and the Australian National University.

Research Interests: Professor Staffel specializes in epistemology, with a focus on formal epistemology. Her work focuses, among other things, on the question of how to make idealized formal models in epistemology applicable and relevant to human, non-ideal thinkers. Her book "Unsettled Thoughts: A Theory of Degrees of Rationality" is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. In it, she explains how Bayesian theories of ideal rationality can be used to account for the idea that rationality comes in degrees. Imperfect reasoners can approximate ideal rationality more or less. The guiding questions for her investigation are: Why should imperfect reasoners approximate ideal rationality if they can never fully reach the ideal? Why is it better to be closer to being ideally rational than farther away from it? How exactly should we characterize approximations to ideal rationality?

She also has research and teaching interests in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, logic, and metaethics.