New Faculty
Boris Babic
Assistant Professor
Boris Babic holds a dual appointment in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Statistical Sciences. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and a visiting professor in the Decision Sciences Department at INSEAD. Besides a PhD in Philosophy and an MS in Statistics, Boris also holds a JD from Harvard Law School.
Please tell us briefly about your research.
My main interests are twofold: First, in legal, ethical, and policy dimensions of artificial intelligence and machine learning (including, for example, privacy, transparency, and bias of algorithmic systems). Second, I work on Bayesian inference and decision making (including, for example, epistemic risk, coherence, updating, learning, aggregating probabilities, and selecting and checking models).
Is there something about yourself or your work that might surprise us? Maybe something you enjoy doing when not thinking philosophy?
I like hockey, skiing, and football (the one played by foot). I don’t know how surprising that is, but having lived in Singapore since 2019, I have not done much of the first two.
Please tell us about something you recently read, listened to, or watched/saw that had an impact and why.
I recently watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings, which I enjoyed.
Tarek Dika
Assistant Professor
Tarek Dika has joined us from the University of Notre Dame, where he taught in the Program of Liberal Studies, the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, and the Department of Philosophy. He was also a Fellow in the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. He currently serves on the comité de lecture (review panel) of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale.
Please tell us briefly about your research.
My research divides into two areas: early modern philosophy and science (principally Descartes) and German and French phenomenology (principally Heidegger and contemporary French phenomenology).
Is there something about yourself or your work that might surprise us? Maybe something you enjoy doing when not thinking philosophy?
I was born and raised in the city of Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit and home to the largest proportion of Arab Americans in the United States, according to Wikipedia.
Please tell us about something you recently read, listened to, or watched/saw that had an impact and why.
I recently reread Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. Every time I read that text I am reminded of the majesty of Husserlian phenomenology and the possibilities of phenomenology as a philosophical method.
Chris Fraser
Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee
Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture
Chris Fraser holds a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy (75%) and the Department of East Asian Studies (25%). His recent books include Late Classical Chinese Thought (Oxford, forthcoming), The Essential Mòzǐ (Oxford, 2020), and The Philosophy of the Mòzǐ (Columbia, 2016). He is also currently working on both a monograph and a translation of the Daoist classic Zhuāngzǐ. Before joining the University of Toronto, Chris was Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong (2009–2021).
Please tell us briefly about your research.
My research interests span many aspects of and historical periods in Chinese philosophy. Most of my publications focus on the classical period, but I am now working on later periods as well.
I am particularly interested in how early Chinese theories of mind, knowledge, and language intersect with contemporary epistemology, action theory, and ethics. I also have a project in progress on the history of Chinese political thought, in particular debates over the role of institutionalized standards, including laws. In effect, this project examines the development of Chinese philosophy of law.
I recently finished the draft of a contribution to the Oxford History of Philosophy series entitled Late Classical Chinese Thought. This book surveys meta-ethics, ethics, political theory, moral psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of language during the third century BC, the period immediately before the onset of China’s first unified dynasty. In the coming year, I’ll be working on a new translation of the Daoist classic Zhuāngzǐ, also under contract with Oxford. At the moment, I’m writing an article discussing how the ethics of the Zhuāngzǐrelates to moral particularism.
Is there something about yourself or your work that might surprise us? Maybe something you enjoy doing when not thinking philosophy?
One surprising point might be that for years I devoted at least as much time to sports as to my academic career. I was an advanced free-skier and in winter spent most of my time in the mountains of Hokkaido. I considered giving up academia to become a professional ski guide. Prior to that for a number of years I raced F18 sailing catamarans in the seas around Hong Kong. Since one of my research interests is Daoist philosophy of action, I considered both of these pursuits “field work.”
Please tell us about something you recently read, listened to, or watched/saw that had an impact and why.
Over the past two years, I have been an eyewitness to the collapse of civil liberties and human rights in Hong Kong, my home for 25 years, where we watched a privileged, self-interested minority of the population betray what previously seemed to be shared civic values, selling out their compatriots’ basic rights in the process. These events have shown me how fragile a liberal society can be and convinced me that those of us in places like Canada should take more active steps to protect liberal democratic values and human rights, both here and abroad.
William Paris
Assistant Professor
William Paris joined the department from Wesleyan University, where he served as the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy. From 2018 to 2020, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. He currently serves as an associate editor of the journal Critical Philosophy of Race.
Please tell us briefly about your research.
My research focuses on history of African American philosophy, 20th-century continental philosophy, and political philosophy. I have published on Frantz Fanon and gender, Sylvia Wynter’s phenomenology of imagination, and I am currently at work on my monograph “Racial Justice and Forms of Life: Towards a Critical Theory of Utopian Epistemology.” In this book I argue that history and social theory ought to be conjoined so as to draw utopian insights from failed struggles for freedom and racial justice that can guide our contemporary analyses toward a reconstructed society.
The main concern of the book is that racial justice that does not attend to our form of life fails to explain why so many movements for racial justice fall short and thus will tend to naturalize aspects of our social life that can be altered. I hope the project will elucidate why we should expand the vision of racial justice beyond dependency on states and bureaucracies and move toward reorganizing the fundamental cultural, political, and economic patterns that make up our form of life. To do this, we will need a utopian epistemology that can produce knowledge of how our world can be different than what it currently is.
Is there something about yourself or your work that might surprise us? Maybe something you enjoy doing when not thinking philosophy?
I am a deep lover of the New York Times crossword puzzle. I usually begin my morning before work doing one.
Please tell us about something you recently read, listened to, or watched/saw that had an impact and why.
I recently read Thomas More’s Utopia and was struck by the depth of insight More had concerning the necessity of the common good for our individual flourishing. When most people hear the word utopia, they think of the fantastical and the impossible. But reading More’s text and his description of utopia, I came away with the feeling that what would be fantastical and impossible is thinking that we can live well-ordered lives without protecting what we all hold in common.
We are also pleased to have several new part-time assistant professors, teaching stream, joining us this year: Douglas Campbell at the UTSC and St. George campuses, Steven Coyne at UTM, Griffin Klemick at St. George, Robert Mason at UTM, and Hamish Russell at UTSC.