Mark Schroeder

About

Mark Schroeder is a philosopher working on understanding persons, belief, and morality. His work is recognized for its clarity, incisiveness, originality, creativity, and depth. Schroeder's research is often divided into four broad strands, characterized by a richly imaginative and argumentative approach. He has supervised many talented PhD students and is actively engaged in developing philosophy that is visible and accessible to a broader audience. In 2025, he is a Sanders Media Fellow in the category for trade books, aiming to reach more people with his work, especially related to conflict and interpersonal relationships. Schroeder teaches at USC, offering graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, and has developed courses on teaching philosophy and the philosophy of interpersonal conflict, which is part of his larger project to establish the philosophy of conflict as a significant field. He also creates educational resources, including lecture videos and slides, to support his teaching and outreach efforts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Law
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Reasons First

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 166 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The last fifty years or more of ethical theory have been preoccupied by a turn to reasons. The vocabulary of reasons has become a common currency not only in ethics, but in epistemology, action theory, and many related areas. It is now common, for example, to see central theses such as evidentialism in epistemology and egalitarianism in political philosophy formulated in terms of reasons. And some have even claimed that the vocabulary of reasons is so useful precisely because reasons ha…

  DOI

• The fundamental reason for reasons fundamentalism

  Philosophical Studies · 2020 · 54 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Desiring Under the Proper Guise

  2023-11-23 · 11 citations

  preprintSenior author

  <p>[Introduction:] "According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with an appearance or judgment to the effect that the object of desire, or at least something systematically related to the object of the desire, satisfies an important normative property or figures in an important normative relation. This thesis has held promise, according to many, to explain why motivation by desire rationalizes or makes intelligible, and doesn’t merely explain, action.…

  PublisherDOI

• The Fundamentals of Reasons

  2024-05-02 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The concept of a reason is now unavoidable in many areas of contemporary philosophy. Central theses in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of action, and the philosophy of the emotions, among others, have come to be framed in terms of reasons. And yet, despite their centrality, theorists seem to take inconsistent things for granted about how reasons work, what kinds of things can be reasons, what reasons favor, and more. Somehow reasons have come to be both indispensa…

  PublisherDOI

• Tipping Points: Abuse and Transformative Discovery

  Free & Equal A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs · 2025-01-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper explores how philosophical accounts of the nature of persons and attributive responsibility can help us to make sense of the kinds of characteristic errors that people make in interpreting what is attributable to one another. I show how this gives us an important tool for understanding some important kinds of interpersonal conflict, with particular attention to understanding why Maya Angelou's advice that "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time" can seem easi…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nathan Robert Howard

  15 shared

• Jacob Ross

  10 shared

• David Botstein

  7 shared

• Kara Dolinski

  Princeton University

  6 shared

• Tzumin Lee

  Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  6 shared

• Daniel E. Weeks

  University of Pittsburgh

  6 shared

• Ulf Landmesser

  Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin

  5 shared

• Niklas Beyhoff

  University of Oxford

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Sanders Media Fellow in the category for trade books (2025)

Similar researchers at University of Southern California

• Lu Chenh-72
• Scott Soamesh-47
• Merrick Andersonh-43