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). With Gideon
Yaffe, he is co-editor of Rational and Social Agency: Essays on
the Philosophy of Michael Bratman (Oxford, forthcoming).
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 Family 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.
Vargas was awarded USF's 2012 Distinguished Research
Award, a university-wide award given annually to a single faculty
member in the university for outstanding research accomplishment.
In its inaugural year, he also received USF's College of
Arts and Sciences Dean's Scholar Award, for "exceptional
scholarly work of great academic value and impact."He has also
twice held USF's annual NEH Chair in the Humanities,
(2005-6, 2013-2014), been awarded a Davies Professorship (2012),
and was a winner (with Saera Khan, psychology) of the Provost
Office's Faculty Team Innovation Award 2011.
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.
