Jonathan Schaffer

Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in metaphysics and epistemology. He is a notable proponent of contrastivism.

Career

Since earning his PhD from Rutgers in 1999, Schaffer has published 56 papers. He wrote his dissertation - "Causation and the Probabilities of Processes" - under Brian McLaughlin. David Lewis served as outside examiner. In 2000, he accepted a position as assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts, earning tenure by 2004.

In 2007, Schaffer accepted a permanent research position at the Australian National University. He subsequently won awards for two papers published that year, the American Philosophical Association's 2008 Article Prize, for "Knowing the Answer" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy's 2008 Best Paper Award, for "From Nihilism to Monism".

In 2010, Schaffer accepted a permanent position at Rutgers University. org/web/20090914165809/https://web.archive.org/web/20090914165809/http://rsss.anu.edu.au/~schaffer/papers/Trumping.pdf Trumping Preemption]