Teaching

As Instructor of Record

• CS186 / Phil 86: How to make a moral agent (Spring 2025-26, co-taught with Jared Moore)
  We combine philosophical classics and state of the art AI research to ask, what about us makes us moral agents? Can machines be like us in those ways? What can we learn about AI from studying our own thinking, and what can we learn about ourselves from AI? Students spend all term developing a project in close consultation with the instructors. Projects have ranged from RL fine-tuning experiments to philosophical fiction.
• Phil 1: Introduction to philosophy (Winter 2024)  Philosophy is a tradition of freely choosing how to live. I introduce the classics of Western philosophy, along with contemporary figures both inside and outside academic philosophy. We end with a case study of the family and family abolition.
• SYMSYS 1: Minds and Machines (Summer 2019–2022)
  An interdisciplinary introduction to the cognitive sciences, combining basic readings in philosophy with basic instruction in computation, game theory, decision theory, and more. I was awarded Stanford’s Symbolic Systems Distinguished Teaching Award 2023 for my work on this course.
• Phil 24D Current Ethical Issues in AI (Spring 2019)
• Phil 24S Environmental Ethics (Summer 2019)

As Teaching Assistant

• Ethics: Introduction to Moral Philosophy; Ethical Theory; Ethics in a Human Life
• CS Ethics and Policy: Computers, Ethics and Public Policy; Ethics, Public Policy and Technological Change
• Philosophy of Mind: Mind, Matter, and Meaning; Philosophy of Neuroscience; Philosophy of Action
• Other: Rational Choice; Metalogic; Film and Philosophy; Philosophy of Law; Introduction to Philosophy

Teaching Interests

I try to emotionally engage my students in every class session, by building lessons around individual moments that grab their attention and stick with them. For example, in teaching about consciousness, I have opened class by stabbing a stuffed animal with a needle. Students viscerally recoil – the demonstration engages their empathy and they feel for the stuffed animal. But (as we know) the stuffed animal is not conscious. Conscious beings, we learn, are just those that feel pleasures and pains for themselves.

Students respond powerfully to both my intellectual seriousness and my personal investment. Students in CS 186 described it as “one of my favorite classes” or “top 2 courses I’ve ever taken at Stanford,” with one writing that it “could become a crown jewel in the SymSys curriculum.” Students have singled out my mentorship for particular praise. One CS 186 student described mentorship “at a level that you might otherwise only be able to access by doing an RAship with a grad student.” Other students have credited my individual mentoring as “the #1 thing I’ve been missing in my classes at Stanford,” and written that “not wanting to let him down kept me going when grades didn’t.”