Randall Harp

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Vermont. My main research interests are in the philosophy of action (particularly collective action, free will, and decision theory) and in the philosophy of social science. My research engages with questions of the proper way to characterize individual versus collective goals, and of the proper way for a model of deliberation to incorporate these goals such that we can account for collective action. I am also interested in the explanatory powers of collective entities (including questions of how much reduction can be had of those collective entities, and of the form that the reduction takes). My other research interests include the explanatory adequacy of rational choice models of human agency, and of the nature of explanation in the behavioral sciences.