Craig Callender

Craig Callender is the Tata Chancellor Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he is also a Founding Faculty member and Co-Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics. He earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1997, completing a dissertation on quantum mechanics and the direction of time. From 1996 to 2000, he worked in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. Callender has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Time, University of Sydney in 2015, and at SOCRATES, Leibniz University Hannover in 2024. According to the UCSD Department of Philosophy, his research interests include philosophy of physics, the metaphysics of science, and philosophy of science in general. His work addresses topics ranging from the nature of time to various applied social and ethical issues.

In 2017, Callender published What Makes Time Special? with Oxford University Press, a book that won the 2018 Lakatos Award—given annually for outstanding contributions to the philosophy of science—and the 2022 Suppes Prize. He has received the UC San Diego Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Award on two occasions: for Research in 2018-19 and for Graduate Teaching in 2007-08. Callender serves as President of the Philosophy of Science Association, Faculty at The John Bell Institute for Quantum Foundations, a member of the Executive Board of the Tata Institute of Genetics and Society, Director of SPLASH Philosophy, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Nature Collective. He organizes the Disinformation Summer Institute, and has served on the International Science Council’s Freedom and Responsibility in Science Committee from 2019 to 2022 and on UCSD’s Committee on Campus Climate Change from 2020 to 2024.

Professional Email: ccallender@ucsd.edu