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

Professor Staffel specializes in epistemology, with a focus on formal epistemology. She also has research and teaching interests in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, logic, and metaethics.

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" was published with OUP in 2019. 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?

The work on her book manuscript was supported by a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and a First Book Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis.

In her free time, Professor Staffel pursues hobbies that involve textiles in various forms, such as knitting and aerial silks.

For more information on Professor Staffel's teaching and research, including a complete list of publications, see her CV.

Her publications are available via her personal website:

Or her profile on philpeople:

Book
Unsettled Thoughts: A Theory of Degrees of Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Research articles
"Transitional Attitudes and the Unmooring View of Higher-Order Evidence," forthcoming in ±·´Çû²õ.
"Updating Incoherent Credences - Extending the Dutch Strategy Argument for Conditionalization," with Glauber De Bona, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
"Pro Tem Rationality," forthcoming in Philosophical Perspectives.
"Normative Uncertainty and Probabilistic Moral Knowledge," Synthese, Special Issue Norms for Risk, 2019, online first.
"Credences and Suspended Judgments as Transitional Attitudes," Philosophical Issues 29 (1), 2019, 281-294.
"How Do Beliefs Simplify Reasoning?" ±·´Çû²õ 53 (4), 2019, 937-962.
"Expressivism, Normative Uncertainty, and Arguments for Probabilism," Oxford Studies in Epistemology (6), 2019, 161-189.
"Why be (approximately) coherent?" with Glauber De Bona, Analysis 78 (3), 2018, 405-415.
"Should I pretend I'm perfect?" Res Philosophica 94 (2), 2017, Special Issue Bridging Formal and Traditional Epistemology. 301-324.
"Graded Incoherence for Accuracy-Firsters," with Glauber De Bona, Philosophy of Science 84 (2), 2017, 189-213.
"Beliefs, Buses and Lotteries," Philosophical Studies 173 (7), 2016, 1721-1734.
"Disagreement and Epistemic Utility-Based Compromise," Journal of Philosophical Logic 44 (3), 2015, 273-286.
"Measuring the Overall Incoherence of Credence Functions," Synthese 192 (5), 2015, 1467-1493.
"Can There be Reasoning with Degrees of Belief?" Synthese 190 (16), 2013, 3535-3551.
"Reply to Roy Sorensen, 'Knowledge-Lies'," Analysis 71 (2), 2011, 300-302.