Jaime Castillo-Gamboa is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Southern California. Prior to USC, he attended the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, where he obtained a BA in humanities and an MA in philosophy. His main areas of interest are metaphysics, philosophy of language, and metaethics. He is currently president of Theorema, a philosophical organization that promotes the study of analytic philosophy in Peru.
What are you most proud of in your professional life?
My work with the Peruvian philosophical community.
While I was doing my MA at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, I helped create the Círculo de Investigación en Filosofía Analítica (CIFA), a research group that brought together students who had an interest in analytic philosophy and were not able to find a place in the intellectual life of a predominantly continental department. CIFA has changed the life of many students, including myself. Not only did it give us the opportunity to pursue our philosophical interests in a friendly environment, it also brought a new perspective on our academic future.
I left the country in 2017 to start my PhD at USC. Besides focusing on my own career, I used every trip back home as an opportunity to collaborate with my Peruvian colleagues. In the last few years, I’ve organized various events: reading groups, work-in-progress sessions and a three-day long philosophy of language conference (Philosophy of Language in Lima, vol. 2).
Last year, together with other Peruvian graduate students, I created Theorema, a nationwide philosophical organization that seeks to establish a wider-reaching network of students and institutions. Our first event was a series of workshops in Spanish featuring Hispanic philosophers such as Agustín Rayo, Carolina Sartorio and Manuel García-Carpintero. Besides promoting analytic philosophy, our goal is to reduce the gap between Peruvian students and students from first-world countries such as the US. With that in mind, we have created the Graduate Coaching Program, which provides support to Peruvian students who want to pursue an academic career in philosophy.
What are you working on right now?
I recently completed a paper on the semantics of implicit comparatives (sentences like Alice is tall compared to Bob) that will appear in the proceedings of ELM. This paper, which I co-wrote with Alexis Wellwood and Deniz Rudin, combines a formal approach to semantics with the analysis of two experiments performed at USC’s Meaning Lab.
As of now, I’m developing a dissertation project in metaphysics under the supervision of Gabriel Uzquiano. The project, which should be ready in a few months (fingers crossed!) will cover (a subset of) the following topics: (i) the relation between ordinary discourse and metaphysical discourse, (ii) Peter van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question (i.e. “under what conditions do some objects compose something?”), and (iii) the connections between the metaphysics of material objects and social metaphysics.
I have some papers in progress, some of which I hope will be submitted soon. I’m particularly excited about some papers I’m co-authoring with other Peruvian grad students. In just a few weeks, I’ll present one of them at the APA Central Division meeting. In that paper, my co-author Gabi Dumet and I present an objection against Mark Jago’s theory of propositions. In a nutshell, we argue that there is a tension between his reduction of truth-making to set-membership and the well-stablished claim that propositions have their truth-conditions essentially.
What do you like to do outside work?
I play guitar almost everyday and enjoy watching (and re-watching) TV series.
What books are currently on your ‘to read’ list?
The Many and the Oneby Salvatore Forio and Øystein Linnebo
Metaphysics, Sophistry, and IllusionbyMark Balaguer
Reality and Moralityby Billy Dunaway
The Science of Meaning, edited by Derek Ball and Brian Rabern
Where would you go in a time machine?
I would travel to Ancient Greece, give Aristotle a (translated) copy of the Begriffsschrift, and see what happens.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
