Who am I?
I am an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Pennsylvania with appointments in
- Philosophy (School of Arts and Sciences)
- Legal Studies and Business Ethics (Wharton School of Business, secondary)
From 2022 to 2024, I was a Consultant with the Boston Consulting Group, where I worked primarily on corporate strategy, organizational efficiency, and DEI, with clients mostly in higher education, the public sector, and industrial goods. I also served as an Ambassador at the BCG Henderson Institute
Research
My most recent research has been primarily in the burgeoning subfield of philosophy of work, focusing on questions like
- What does a good relationship between a manager and employee look like?
- How does information flow affect firms and their workers?
- Why do we have employment in the first place?
Before returning to academia in 2024, my research focused more squarely on epistemology and social philosophy. I’ve written extensively on the question of what we should believe, information flow and control in groups, and the meaning and effects of diversity and polarization
My first book, Right Belief and True Belief (Oxford, Oct. 2023), argues for a general truth-loving epistemic consequentialist theory of what we should believe
Much of my research about social philosophy is done with the Computational Social Philosophy Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that uses an empirically-informed approach to using agent-based models to investigate questions in social epistemology, political philosophy, and philosophy of science
Teaching
I teach both undergrad and graduate classes, including regularly teaching Penn’s Introduction to Epistemology and Metaphysics, Introduction to Mathematical Logic, and Wharton’s Ethics and Social Responsibility. In 2018, I won the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor from the School of Arts and Sciences and was lauded for the “sheer number of students who say that Singer is the best professor they’ve ever had.”
Background
I started at Penn as an Assistant Professor in January of 2013, and I received tenure and a promotion to Associate Professor in July 2019. From 2022 to 2024, I was on leave from Penn and worked as a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. Before coming to Penn, I received a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Michigan
When I’m not working, I like to run and take pictures of birds ![]()
Contact Me:
Email: singerd@phil.upenn.edu
Office: 461 Cohen Hall
433 Cohen Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304
Phone: +1 920-4Singer
