Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the
University of San Francisco. His principal research interests
include moral agency, philosophical issues in the law, and Latin
American philosophy. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral
Responsibility (Oxford, 2013). With John Martin
Fischer, Robert Kane, and Derk Pereboom, he co-authored Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell,
2007). He is co-editor of Rational and Social Agency: Essays on
Themes in the Philosophy of Michael Bratman (Oxford,
forthcoming) with Gideon Yaffe.
Vargas was a recipient of the first American Philosophical
Association Prize in Latin American Thought, and his research on
responsible agency has been recognized with year-long research
fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study at Harvard, and the Stanford Humanities Center. He
has also been a Visiting Fellow at the McCoy Center for Ethics
in Society at Stanford University, and has held visiting
appointments at the University of California,
Berkeley, and the California Institute of
Technology.
At the University of San Francisco, Vargas has taught courses
for the philosophy and psychology departments, the program in Latin
American Studies and the Honors Program in the Humanities, the St.
Ignatius Institute, and the School of Law. In its inaugural year
(2012) he received USF's College of Arts and Sciences
Dean's Scholar Award, for "exceptional scholarly work of
great academic value and impact." While at USF, he has held the NEH
Chair in the Humanities, (2005-6), been awarded a Team Innovation
Award (with Saera Khan, psychology) for development of
USF's Program on Mind and Agency (2011-2012), and held a
Davies Forum Professorship (2012). In 2012, he was awarded the
USF's Distinguished Research Award, a university-wide
award given annually to a single faculty member for outstanding
research accomplishment.
