Daniel Robert Fogal

Assistant Professor of Bioethics

Professional overview

Daniel Fogal is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Bioethics and Faculty Adviser for the Bioethics Minor. He earned his B.A. from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and his Ph.D. from NYU.

Fogal specializes in bioethics, metaethics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Current and future work includes how best to understand the notion of rationality relevant to decision-making capacity and informed consent, the moral significance of irrational values and beliefs, the epistemological implications of the internet, and conceptual engineering in bioethics. Past research has included work on the nature of rationality (‘Rational Requirements and the Primacy of Pressure’, Mind), the nature of normative explanations (‘The Metaphysics of Moral Explanations’ Oxford Studies in Metaethics), and the nature of both normative and motivating reasons (‘Reasons, Reason, and Context’, in Weighing Reasons; ‘Deflationary Pluralism about Motivating Reasons’, in The Factive Turn in Epistemology). In addition to teaching and research, Fogal has been active in philosophical outreach programs and in organizing professional conferences and workshops.

Prior to his current appointment, Fogal was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the NYU Center for Bioethics, and prior to that he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Uppsala University in association with the Varieties of Normativity project (principal investigator: Matti Eklund).

Publications

Publications

Ditching decision-making capacity

Explaining normative reasons

The weight of reasons

Rational requirements and the primacy of pressure

Deflationary pluralism about motivating reasons

New Work on speech acts

On the scope, jurisdiction, and application of rationality and the law

Speech acts

Contextualism about epistemic reasons

Descartes and the possibility of enlightened freedom