Rate My Professor Alan Hájek

Alan Hájek is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University, where he joined the Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Sciences as Professor of Philosophy in 2005. He earned a B.Sc. (Hons) in statistics and mathematics from the University of Melbourne in 1982, winning the Dwight Prize in Statistics. He received an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario in 1986 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1993, where he was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship. Earlier in his career, Hájek taught at the University of Melbourne in 1990 and served on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology from 1992 to 2004, receiving the Associated Students of California Institute of Technology Teaching Award in 2004. He has held visiting professor positions at MIT in 1995, the University of Auckland in 2000, and Singapore Management University in 2005. Since 2007, he has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and served as President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy from 2009 to 2010.

Hájek's research specializations lie in the philosophical foundations of probability and decision theory, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. His influential publications include "Interpretations of Probability" (2002, over 1,000 citations), "What Conditional Probability Could Not Be" (2003, winner of the American Philosophical Association Article Prize), "Waging War on Pascal's Wager" (2003, selected by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles), "The Reference Class Problem is Your Problem Too" (2007, 380 citations), and "What are Degrees of Belief?" with Lina Eriksson (2007, 290 citations). More recent work includes "Degrees of Commensurability and the Repugnant Conclusion" with Wlodek Rabinowicz (2022), also honored by The Philosopher’s Annual. He has received the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences Award for Excellence in Supervision (2012) and the university-wide Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Supervision (2013).