Vargas is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral
Responsibility (Oxford, in press). With John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, and
Derk
Pereboom, he
co-authored Four Views
on Free Will
(Blackwell, 2007). He is editing Rational
and
Social Agency: Essays on the
Philosophy of Michael Bratman (with Gideon Yaffe). Vargas' main
philosophical interests
include the nature of moral agency, the philosophy of law, Latin American
philosophy, (especially historical work on race and identity) and
questions
of philosophical
methodology. 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 in Philosophy,
Psychology, Latin
American Studies, the Honors Program in the Humanities, and the St.
Ignatius Institute. 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.
