Laura Nicoară

Hi, I'm Laura. (That's pronounced like in Spanish or Italian. I'm actually Romanian, but fewer people get that reference.) I like thinking about the social world, norms, and all the fun ways in which they interact.

 

I'm currently completing my PhD at the University of Southern California, working with Mark Schroeder, Robin Jeshion, Gabriel Uzquiano, and Steve Finlay. Before this, I got a few degrees in various places in Europe. Feel free to take a look at my CV for more info.

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I work primarily in social ontology, feminist philosophy, aesthetics, and ethics. My dissertation is on the metaphysics of social kinds. I'm highly confident I got that one 100% worked out, so now I've been starting to think about the metaethics of social norms. Generally, I like all types of normative things that fall a bit short of being truly authoritative: institutional reasons, the rules of games, attributive goodness, functional kinds, and, of course, social norms. Here are some of my current projects.

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Other than philosophy, my favorite thing to do is read as profligately and eclectically as I can. I like, in no particular order: anything to do with Ancient Rome (I have a Classics degree too!), pop culture, social history, fashion, telenovelas, culinary history, terminally online internet discourse, fanfiction, pseudoacademia and pseudoscience, Continental philosophy and critical theory, and occasionally true crime. Because I can't help it, I sometimes have paper ideas about these things.