Samuel C. Rickless
Professor of Philosophy
Email: srickless@ucsd.edu
[updated: 09/10/2024]
Welcome!
If you would like to learn more about me and my work, please choose among the links on the left side of this webpage.
I am on sabbatical for the academic year 2024-2025. From the beginning of January to the end of June 2025, I will be a Visiting Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
My research interests include the history of European philosophy (with emphasis on Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Shepherd), moral philosophy (particularly non-consequentialist ethics based on the doctrine of doing and allowing and a secular version of the doctrine of double effect), legal philosophy (including issues of legal interpretation and problems related to the right to privacy, as well as due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution), and the philosophy of language. I am a member of the Moral Judgments Project, working with professors and graduate students in philosophy and psychology on research in experimental philosophy.
The undergraduate courses I teach regularly include symbolic logic (Phil 120), the history of early modern European philosophy (Phil 111), Plato (Phil 100), freedom, equality, and the law (Phil 165), and more recently the meaning of life (Phil 141). Recent graduate seminars have focused on the following figures/topics: Mary Astell; John Locke; George Berkeley, David Hume, and Mary Shepherd; the ethics of risk; moral sentimentalism in modern European philosophy.
I started the UC San Diego Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl team in 2018 and served as the team's coach through the 2023-24 season. In 2018, the team won three out of four rounds at the California Regional Tournament, and narrowly missed out on an invitation to the National Tournament. In 2019, one of our two teams earned second place in the California Regional, and participated in the National Tournament in Atlanta in February 2020. Because of the pandemic, I took a hiatus in 2020-21. In fall 2021, the team again earned second place in the California Regional, participated in the National Tournament (online), and made it to the quarter-finals before losing to the eventual winners, Macalester College. UC San Diego fielded a new team (with two members of the Fall 2021-Spring 2022 team returning) in Fall 2022, and earned third place in the California Regional, thereby receiving another invitation to the National Tournament, which was held in March 2023 in Portland, OR. The team did not make it past the preliminary rounds at the National Tournament, but it did lose very narrowly to the eventual tournament winners, the United States Naval Academy. In Fall 2023, an excellent and well-prepared team was unfortunately unable to compete in the California Regional because of illness. In 2024-25, the team will be coached by my colleague, Prof. Reuven Brandt. Please contact Prof. Brandt if you have any questions about Ethics Bowl at UC San Diego or would like to join the UC San Diego Ethics Bowl Team in Fall 2024.
News
Recently published
"Trolley Problems Reimagined: Sensitivity to Ratio, Risk, and Comparisons," (with Craig R. M. McKenzie, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Arseny A. Ryazanov). In Experiments in Moral and Political Philosophy, edited by Fernando Aguiar, Antonio Gaitan, and Hugo Viciana (New York and London: Routledge, 2024), pp. 62-82.
Recently completed
"Locke in the Context of Early Modern Philosophy." To appear in The Oxford Handbook of Locke, edited by Patrick Connolly.
"Locke on Morality and Religion." To appear in Studi Lockiani, guest edited by Diego Lucci.
"Shepherd's Argument for the Causal Maxim: 'There is no Object Which Begins to Exist, but Must Owe its Existence to Some Cause.'" To appear in a collection of essays on Mary Shepherd, edited by Keota Fields.
Draft of a paper on legal adjudication, "A Theory of Legal Adjudication," which was the subject of a workshop at UCLA Law School in November 2021.
You can find a podcast in which I discuss my meaning of life course here.