PhD Students

ADVISOR


Fabrizzio McManus Guerrero
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(UNAM)

Fabrizzio studied Biology in the Faculty of Sciences at UNAM from 2000 to 2004 and wrote, as his undergraduate thesis, a taxonomic revision of the genus Jatropha (fam. Euphorbiaceae). From 2004 to 2006 he was a masters student in the Program in Philosophy of Science also at UNAM. There he wrote his master thesis focusing on the philosophical problems of phylogenetic reconstruction. His masters thesis won two prizes: the Norman Sverdlin prize for best philosophy thesis in 2006, and the UNAM prize medal "Alfonso Caso."He started his doctorate in the same program in 2006. In his dissertation, he analyzed homosexuality in the context of philosophical accounts of mechanistic explanation and biopower.

 

He successfully defended (with honors) his dissertation in November 2010. Dissertation title:

La homosexualidad a la luz de la filosofía de la ciencia: Mecanismos biologicos, subjetividad y poder

(Homosexuality in Light of the Philosophy of Science: Biological Mechanisms, Subjectivity, and Power)


Fabrizzio estudió Biología en la Facultad de Ciencias de la UNAM del año 2000 al 2004 y escribió a modo de tesis de licenciatura un tratamiento taxonómico del género Jatropha (fam. Euphorbiaceae). De 2004 a 2006 fue un estudiante de maestría del Posgrado en Filosofía de la Ciencia

de la UNAM. Allí escribió una tesis de maestría sobre los problemas filosóficos de la reconstrucción filogenética. Empezó su doctorado en el mismo programa en 2006. Su trabajo analiza la homosexualidad en el contexto de la explicación mecanística y el biopoder. Defendió su tesis de manera exitosa, con mención honorífica, en noviembre del 2010.



Lucas McGranahan 
Email Lucas 

Visit Lucas' Website

(UCSC)  

 

Lucas received his BA in philosophy and English from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2003, worked for a while in the "real world," and is now finishing his PhD in philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz. Rasmus is his primary advisor, and he also works closely with David Hoy. The title of his dissertation is: 

 
Evolutionary Pragmatism: 
The Darwinian Structure of William James's Thought 
[View dissertation abstract.] 
 
Lucas' principal research interest is in the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy, in particular American pragmatism (esp. James) and German philosophy (esp. Nietzsche). He approaches these traditions from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science, focusing on questions of how best to adjudicate the conceptual and disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, biology, and psychology. Lucas' paper "William James' Social Evolutionism in Focus" won the Douglas Greenlee Prize for best paper by a grad student or recent PhD at the 2011 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.
 

Lucas is also interested in the broader sweep of the history of philosophy, as well as in the philosophy of film and embodied cognition. Lucas has been a TA for innumerable courses and a primary instructor for the philosophy of film and writing composition. He won an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from UCSC's Graduate Division in Spring 2011. He is also a literacy tutor for the San Francisco non-profit organization Refugee Transitions. Lucas enjoys both the philosophy of teaching and teaching itself.

Alexis Mourenza 

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(UCSC) 

 

Alexis is a PhD student in the Philosophy department at UC Santa Cruz and her area of emphasis is in the philosophy of nonhuman animal minds.  Her two co-advisors are Richard Otte and Rasmus. She received her BA in Philosophy with an emphasis in Ethics and Public Policy from University of California, Santa Barbara (2005) and was awarded an MA in interdisciplinary Liberal Studies from Dartmouth College (2007) with a thesis on psychological altruism in non-human primates.

 

Alexis investigates the practices and products of animal behavior and cognition (ABC) research with the aim of identifying and evaluating points of contestation within the field in what seem like irreconcilable debates amongst the researchers.  She’s interested in how methodological biases and theoretical assumptions about the structure and function of the human mind inhibit the demonstration of complex cognition in nonhuman and nonlinguistic animals.

 

Currently her research centers around the potentials of nonhuman animal cognition, the plasticity of the structures of mind, and the role of experimental training and testing procedures of ABC research in eliciting cognitive capacities that may be widespread throughout the animal kingdom, despite the fact that the expression of those abilities in the animal subjects’ most common environments may not be expressed and functioning as ‘species-typical’ traits of the nonhuman animal subject under investigation.

 

The working title of her dissertation is:

 

Making Up Minds or Disappearing Minds? 

Biases and Assumptions of Nonhuman Animal Cognition Research

 

 

Andrew Delunas 
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(UCSC)
 
Andrew is a PhD student in the Philosophy department at UC Santa Cruz and his areas of emphasis are history of philosophy (particularly the Early Modern period) and Pragmatism. He received his BA (2003) and MA (2005) in philosophy from the University of Missouri, St. Louis. His masters thesis was on the political philosophy of David Hume.
 
Andrew is interested in debates about the possibility and actuality of objectivity in science. The controversies surrounding competing views of objectivity as espoused by Richard Rorty and the feminist standpoint theories (e.g., Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and Helen Longino, etc.) on the one hand, and the tradition "the view from nowhere" views of objectivity espoused by Paul Boghossian, Thomas Nagel, and Hilary Putnam on the other, make up the basis of Andrew's dissertation research. Rasmus is Andrew's advisor. 
 
The working title of his dissertation is: 
 
Rorty, Feminist Standpoint Theory, and the Future of Objectivity: 
Facts, Values, and the Relevance of Science in Everyday Life.
 
COMMITTEE MEMBER
 
Octavio Valadez Blanco
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UNAM
 
Octavio is currently studying his PhD in Philosophy of Science at UNAM in Mexico City, with the project "Complexity and Transdisciplinarity: Theory and practice of cancer as a complex problem." Octavio obtained his B.Sc. degree in Basic Biomedical Research at UNAM with his thesis work "Cancer as a complex disease: networks and levels of organization" (2008), with Germinal Cocho Gil as advisor. In 2010, he obtained his Masters in Philosophy from the UAM-Iztapalapa and was awarded the UAM academic merit medal. His thesis (advised by Mario Casanueva) addressed the scientific explanation of cancer based on the model of "part-whole science" proposed by Rasmus (Winther 2011, Synthese), which develops a pluralistic research horizon. 
 
Octavio's main academic interests are the complexity of cancer, as this problem cannot be understood, much less solved if we do not consider and articulate the philosophical, sociological, historical and political aspects involved. Octavio intends to contribute to a critical focus on the theories and practices in the scientific disciplines related to cancer research--especially the biomedical sciences--in which abstractions often turn into reifications of reality thus hampering the creativity and the possibility of a plurality of scientific views and practices. This critical approach has in part evolved from Octavio's great concern for the deep contradictory realities prevailing in Mexico, which has also prompted him to undertake studies on politics and pedagogy, as well as to actively participate in novel scholarly projects, extra-curricular organizations, and general education.