PhD Michael Shaffer

Michael Shaffer was professor of philosophy at St. Cloud State University from 2005 to 2020, and also held prior positions at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington and at Southern Connecticut State University. He is a Rotman Fellow at The University of Western Ontario, a fellow of the Center for Formal Epistemology at Carnegie-Mellon University-Center for Formal Epistemology, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at The University of Utah and a Lakatos Fellow at the London School of Economics. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at The University of Miami under the direction of Risto Hilpinen and holds an M.A. and B.A. in philosophy from Northern Illinois University.

Research Interests

Dr. Shaffer’s research interests include epistemology (reliabilism, rationality, evidence, the nature of belief/acceptance, the a priori, quasi-factive beliefs and testimony), philosophy of science (idealization, explanation, evidence, the social structure of science and the philosophy of psychiatry and medicine), formal epistemology and logic (belief revision, paradoxes, Bayesianism, foundations of probability theory, deontic logic and conditional logics), the philosophy of mathematics (the nature of abstract objects), analytic philosophy (Carnap, Russell, Reichenbach, Planck and Lakatos), the philosophy of language (possible worlds semantics and norms of assertion) and decision theory (decision under total uncertainty and decision theory and deontic logic).