Gideon Rosen


Gideon Rosen is an American philosopher. He is a Stuart Professor of Philosophy and the chair of the philosophy department at Princeton University, where he specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, and ethics.

Education and career

Rosen obtained his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1992, under the supervision of Paul Benacerraf. He taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for several years before joining the Princeton faculty in 1993. He has served as chair of Princeton's Council of the Humanities and director of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows.

Philosophical work

In 1990 Rosen introduced modal fictionalism, a popular position on the ontological status of possible worlds. He is the co-author of A Subject with No Object, a contribution to the philosophy of mathematics written with Princeton colleague John P. Burgess. His recent work in metaphysics is about the concept of ground.
Rosen's work in moral philosophy has also been influential. He argues for a new variety of skepticism about moral responsibility, separate from the traditional dilemma posed by the compatibilism problem. His view is that there is an epistemic problem for positive judgments of responsibility. Such judgments are never justified because they are necessarily under-evidenced in a certain way, due to the natures of normativity and normative ignorance.

Selected articles