SoCal Pragmatist Forum
Anna Boncompagni
Anna Boncompagni (she/her) is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of California, Irvine.​
She is interested in and works on pragmatist thinkers and perspectives since her PhD (University of Roma Tre, Italy), which focused on a comparison between the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the pragmatism of Charles s. Peirce and William James. She published the results of her PhD work in the volume Wittgenstein and Pragmatism. On Certainty in the Light of Peirce and James (Palgrave, 2016) and developed the comparison in several articles and book chapters, some also dealing with the so-called “middle” Wittgenstein and Frank P. Ramsey.​
Her main areas of research are the history of contemporary philosophy, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology. She likes to combine insights from a historical approach with the study of social issues such as prejudice, the nature of common sense, conceptual change, and hermeneutical injustice, often with reference to LGBTQ issues and themes. Her recent publications include the Cambridge Element Wittgenstein on Forms of Life (CUP, 2022) and the articles “Prejudice in Testimonial Justification: A Hinge Account” (Episteme, 2021), “Forms of Life and Linguistic Change: The Case of Trans Communities” (Philosophies, 2023), and “Hermeneutical Injustice and Bisexuality; Towards New Conceptual Tools” (Hypatia, forthcoming).​
She is currently working (or should be!) on a pragmatist perspective on conceptual change, and on the relationship between Wittgenstein and feminist epistemologies.​
She teaches courses on the history of contemporary philosophy (usually centered on pragmatism), social epistemology, and feminist epistemology.
Andrew Howat
Andrew Howat (he/him) is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. He grew up in Scotland and studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh (1997-2001), where he was extremely fortunate to be taught by terrific philosophers like Rae Langton, Richard Holton, Alexander Bird, Huw Price, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, and Timothy Williamson.
He did his PhD in Sheffield (2003-2007) with Chris Hookway (retired) and Rob Hopkins (now at NYU). While there he was profoundly influenced by the remarkably friendly, pluralistic, and rigorous environment and by the strong feminist community created by Professors and fellow students such as Jenny Saul, Lindsey Porter, Jules Holroyd, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc, and many others.
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His dissertation defended the idea that truth is a response-dependent concept and that this is a novel way to frame and defend classical pragmatism and its critique of metaphysical realism.
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After several years of temporary appointments in the UK (at Sheffield, Nottingham, and Hull), he was hired by CSUF in 2011 as an Assistant Professor, in large part because of his unusual combined interests in both mainstream analytic metaphysics/philosophy of language and classical pragmatism. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017 and Full Professor in 2022.
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At the upper division, he regularly teaches metaphysics, philosophy of language, American Philosophy, and Symbolic Logic. At the lower division, he regularly teaches introduction to logic and introduction to philosophy.
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He has published papers, mostly on Peirce’s conception of truth, in journals such as Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, Synthese, Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, and Philosophia. He has recently authored chapters on various aspects of pragmatism in edited collections published by Routledge and Oxford University Press. He is currently the editor for the PhilPapers.org category on Charles S. Peirce.
He is currently working on a book on Peircean Truth, a chapter contrasting Rorty’s and Hannah Arendt’s views on the relationship between truth and politics, and a defense of Peirce’s scholastically realist metaphysics.
Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan (he/him) is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton. He did his undergraduate work at the University of New Hampshire, where he was introduced to pragmatism by his mentors, David Hiley and Willem deVries. As a graduate student at the University of California, Riverside, he began work on Kant's pragmatic anthropology under Pierre Keller's direction.
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In addition to research interests in the history of philosophy, Patrick is interested in a range of issues surrounding mental disorder. He is currently working on a project that unifies these two areas: Kant offers an account of mental disorder within his pragmatic anthropology. Patrick aims to understand what a pragmatic inquiry into human beings is for Kant, why mental disorder is properly understood pragmatically, and in turn what physiological inquiry into human beings leaves out.
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With his students at CSUF, Patrick leads an ongoing project that aims to better understand why some disagreements are so intractable, and how research on this issue can be put into practice to improve our disagreement culture.
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"Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry."