Selim Berker is the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard University, where he works on the foundations of normativity — the philosophical study of how we ought to act and what we ought to believe — having made an unusual intellectual journey from physics to philosophy.
Berker earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1998 — the year of his Hertz Fellowship — before being admitted as a doctoral candidate in physics. He subsequently left physics to pursue philosophy, earning his Ph.D. in philosophy from MIT in 2007 under advisors there. He joined the Harvard philosophy faculty and has been recognized as a Harvard College Professor for his commitment to undergraduate teaching. His primary research interests span ethics and epistemology, which he views as two aspects of a unified inquiry into what we ought to do and what we ought to believe.
