Zed Adams
Associate Professor of Philosophy; Vice President of Technology; Co-Director, Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities
Email
zed@newschool.edu
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Profile
Zed Adams joined the Philosophy department in 2008 and co-founded the Institute for Philosophy and the New Humanities in 2020. His research interests include ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of mind. Most recently he has published On the Genealogy of Color: A Case Study in Historicized Conceptual Analysis, an engagement with philosophical debates about color realism which foregrounds the history of color science. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Degrees Held
PhD 2008, University of Chicago
Recent Publications
Books
On the Genealogy of Color: A Case Study in Historicized Conceptual Analysis (Routledge, 2016)
Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland, co-editor with Jake Browning, (MIT Press, 2016)
On the Genealogy of Color: A Case Study in Historicized Conceptual Analysis (Routledge, 2015)
Articles and Book Chapters
"The Hope of Agreement: Against Vibing Accounts of Aesthetic Judgment" (with Nat Hansen) in Mind, Volume 133, Issue 531, July 2024, Pages 742–760.
"Why Twitter does not gamify communication" (with Jacob Browning) in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, published online October 13, 2023.
“Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age” (with Jake Browning) in The Cultural History of Colour: The Modern Age, eds. Sarah Street and Anders Steinvall (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
“How Colour Qualia Became a Problem” (with Jake Browning), Journal of Consciousness Studies Vol. 27, Nos. 5-6 (2020)
“The Myth of the Common Sense Conception of Color” (with Nat Hansen) in Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy And Psychology of Conceptual Variability, eds. Åsa Wikforss and Teresa Marques (Oxford University Press, 2020)
“Surface Noise,” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 58, No. 3 (2018)
“On the Ontology of Mechanically Reproduced Artworks” (Popular Music and Society, 2015)
"Cognitive Spread: Under What Conditions Does the Mind Extend Beyond the Body?" (with Chauncey Maher, European Journal of Philosophy, 2015)
"Against Moral Intellectualism" (Philosophical Investigations, 2014)
"Chauncey Maher, Strange but True: On the Counter-Intuitiveness of the Extended Mind Hypothesis" (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2013)
Research Interests
Ethics, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind
Current Courses
First Year Seminar
LNGC 1400, Fall 2025
Iconoclasm: Past and Present
GLIB 6158, Fall 2025
Iconoclasm: Past and Present
GPHI 6176, Fall 2025
Independent Study
GPHI 6990, Fall 2025
Independent Study
LPHI 3950, Fall 2025
Philosophy of Perception
GPSY 6465, Fall 2025
Philosophy of Perception
GPHI 6776, Fall 2025
Future Courses
Ind Senior Project
LPHI 4990, Spring 2026
Independent Study
GPHI 6990, Spring 2026
Independent Study
LPHI 3950, Spring 2026
Lo-Fi Aesthetics
LPHI 2066, Spring 2026
The History of Vision
GPHI 6174, Spring 2026
Past Courses
Here Come the Robots
LPHI 3067, Spring 2025
Ind Senior Project
LPHI 4990, Spring 2025
Independent Study
GPHI 6990, Spring 2025
Independent Study
LPHI 3950, Spring 2025
Normativity of Artifacts
GPHI 6165, Spring 2025