Keith DeRose

Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy, Yale University

office: 451 College St. (the “Yale Philosophy Building”), room 302
(203) 432-1674
keith.derose@yale.edu

I’ve been a member of the Yale Philosophy department since the fall of 1998. I did my undergraduate work at Calvin College (1980-84), graduating with a major in philosophy , and did my graduate studies at UCLA , receiving my Ph.D. in philosophy in 1990. I then taught in the philosophy departments at New York University (1990-1993) and at Rice University (1993-1998) before coming to Yale. My primary areas of research and interest are epistemology (especially skepticism), philosophy of language (especially epistemological language and also conditionals), history of modern philosophy (especially Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Reid) and philosophy of religion (especially the problem of evil and religious epistemology).

  • For a list of my philosophical publications, and other info, see my CV .
  • For a list of my philosophy papers that are available on-line, click here .
  • Pages for classes I am teaching or have taught are here.
  • See the sidebar to the left for other material available on this site.

What I’m working on

  • a book whose title gives you a good idea of its topic (though of the 3 Hs before the colon, the emphasis is very much on the first one in a way the title doesn’t indicate): Horrific Suffering, Divine Hiddenness, and Hell: The Place of Freedom in a World Governed by God. A very partial and quite drafty partial draft is up on my list of works available on-line (top item) here.
  • I’m also working on a paper that draws together some material I’ve been teaching for years (some of which has seeped into my last book and the book (immediately above) that I’m currently working on): “Phenomenal Conservatism in Epistemology and in Philosophical Methodology”
  • a personal piece, “Why God Allows Three-Year-Olds to Be Burned to Death in House Fires.” When 3H (above) kinda bogged down, I decided to write up my positive account of why God allows horrors as an independent piece (so I didn’t have to worry about the connections to the rest of 3H), with the idea of then jamming it into 3H. And it was kinda personal because that’s the only way I could do it at the time. But it seems to be turning itself into a short book in its own right? Partial draft is the 2nd from the top item at my list of writings I have on-line.
thinking-HF
I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” -Huckleberry Finn

I scanned this drawing, by E.W. Kemble, from the 1885 edition (New York: Charles L. Webster and Company) of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, p. 271. To see the other drawings by Kemble from the first edition (and another scanning of “Thinking”), see Virginia H. Cope’s Huckleberry Finn site at the University of Virginia.