Jay Wallace works in moral philosophy. His interests extend to all parts of the subject (including its history), and to such allied areas as political philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophy of action. His research has focused on responsibility, moral psychology, and the theory of practical reason. Recently he has written on promising, normativity, constructivism, resentment, hypocrisy, love, and regret and affirmation (among other topics). Current research projects include a study of the relational elements in moral theory (working title: The Moral Nexus).
Wallace was an undergraduate at Williams College, where he received the B.A. degree in 1979. He did his graduate work at the University of Oxford (B.Phil. 1983) and at Princeton University (Ph.D. 1988). He has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and has held visiting positions at the Universität Bielefeld, in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch (New Zealand), and at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He was Chair of the Philosophy Department at Berkeley from 2005-2010, and his honors include a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a senior Research Award (“Forschungspreis”) from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
