I am Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Previously, I have served as Assistant Lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences at Coker University in Hartsville, South Carolina, and as Lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I hold a PhD in philosophy from Boston University (2020), an MA in philosophy from the University of British Columbia (2014), and a BA in philosophy from Mount Allison University (2008). 

My primary research is in social/political philosophy and critical philosophy of race, particularly issues relating to political responsibility, group-based injustice, and the moral significance of the past. My dissertation (supervised by Ann E. Cudd, David Lyons, and Juliet Floyd) defends a new empirically informed approach to the political problem of Black reparations in the US that finds new work for the principle of fair play. I’m also interested in feminist philosophy, metaethics, the philosophy of science (esp. the evolutionary and human sciences), and in pragmatism and the American philosophical tradition more broadly. 

My work has been supported by master’s and doctoral awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2017, I received the American Philosophical Association’s Jean Hampton Prize for the essay that would go on to inform my doctoral work. This was the first and only time that prize – awarded every two years to an early career scholar at the Pacific Division – has been received by a graduate student.

You can reach me at joseph dot frigault at claremontmckenna dot edu.