Wesley Holliday

Wesley H. Holliday is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Chair of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University in June 2012 with a dissertation titled "Knowing What Follows: Epistemic Closure and Epistemic Logic," advised by Johan van Benthem and Krista Lawlor, and his B.A. with Honors in Philosophy from Stanford University in June 2007. Holliday joined UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy in July 2012, advanced to Associate Professor in July 2017, and was promoted to Professor in July 2021. He has served as a Faculty Member of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science since May 2013. Additionally, he is an affiliate of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy, a Steering Committee member of the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, co-organizer of the workshop series on Social Choice for AI Ethics and Safety and the Berkeley AI Risk group, a member of the Board of Directors of Better Choices for Democracy, and editor of the Diamond Open Access journal Philosophical Logic.

Holliday's research specializes in logic and social choice theory. In logic, his interests encompass modal and nonclassical logic, logic and natural language, logic and probability, and logic and computation. In social choice theory, he focuses on voting theory, computational social choice, and applications to AI ethics and safety. His major awards and honors include the E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize from the Association for Logic, Language, and Information in 2013, the Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship from UC Berkeley in 2016, the Humanities Research Fellowship from UC Berkeley in 2015, and the ARIA Safeguarded AI grant in 2025 for "Aggregating Safety Preferences for AI Systems: A Social Choice Approach." Key publications include "Split Cycle: A New Condorcet Consistent Voting Method Independent of Clones and Immune to Spoilers" with Eric Pacuit (Public Choice, 2023), "Stable Voting" with Eric Pacuit (Constitutional Political Economy, 2023), "The Orthologic of Epistemic Modals" with Matthew Mandelkern (Journal of Philosophical Logic, 2024), "An extension of May’s Theorem to three alternatives: axiomatizing Minimax voting" with Eric Pacuit (Social Choice and Welfare, 2025), and "Social Choice Should Guide AI Alignment in Dealing with Diverse Human Feedback" with multiple co-authors (Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024).

Professional Email: wesholliday@berkeley.edu