I am a PhD candidate in Stanford University's Philosophy Department, with interests in the history and philosophy of physics and in the history of philosophy, especially the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant and various post-Kantian figures. See here for more on my research and/or download my CV.
I have served as a teaching assistant at Stanford for courses including the history and philosophy of spacetime and gravitational physics (once), the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics (three times), mathematical logic, and a writing-intensive introductory course. I will be the primary instructor for an introductory course on the philosophy of science in the summer session of 2025 at Stanford. I also taught high school mathematics for one year prior to beginning my PhD; prior to that, I developed user-interactive tools (three Java applications and one Javascript page) for learning Special and General Relativity. See more here.
When I'm not philosophizing or teaching, I like to bond with my cats, watch films, and cold-water swim in the Pacific ocean.
Here are links directly to run the three Java applications in your browser (each link opens a new tab):
Each file will download as a .zip file; unzip the file and run the .jar file in the resulting folder. (Latest version of Java required.) Note that the .jar files are unsigned (but are safe to run)---look up how to open unsigned .jar files on your OS to run them.
And here are links directly to the Javascript page (a three-dimension simulation of the "frame-dragging" effect of General Relativity) and to a supporting paper:
My dissertation is concerned to bring out that spin-gravity coupling is significantly undertheorized despite arguments purporting to establish that it is well-constrained a priori. There is no empirical data concerning this coupling, but relatively low-hanging empirical fruit to reap in characterizing the orientations of spin-measuring-devices (e.g. polarizers) when measurement events on spin-entangled states are perfectly anti-correlated. One might think that these orientations must be specified by the operation of parallel transport from General Relativity, but this is not so: there are many possible operations consistent with the theoretical and empirical support of GR; further, GR's application to macroscopic spinning bodies proves immaterial to the question of how intrinsic or point-wise defined spin should couple to gravity. The local structure of relativistic spacetimes also leaves open many more possibilities than has been appreciated, as I show by examination of the support for the "minimal coupling" procedure and of what theories this procedure allows (more than has been appreciated). The general issue can be interfaced with discussions of background independence as typically discussed in making sense of the conceptual novelty of General Relativity: in light of the a priori constraints on what a theory of spin-gravity coupling must look like, should we expect such a theory to be background independent, and if so in what sense? (My answer to this latter question is a work in progress.)
I am also interested in the work of Niels Bohr. After studying his response to EPR, I found I could only make charitable sense of it by looking to his pre-EPR writings: rather than advancing a hazy instrumentalism, he was concerned to work out consequences of a physical postulate uncontroversially standing at quantum theory's foundations, namely that of the reality of the Einstein-Planck-de Broglie relations; interestingly, I find him in effect to have provided a physical rationale for the contextuality of position and momentum properties—that is, for explaining why their manifestations cannot be understood independently of their physical context. You can see an article making that case here. I am interested in further exploring Bohr's thought with this framing and its bearing on contemporary issues in the foundations of quantum theory, such as the measurement problem and the relation of quantum mechanics to quantum field theory.
Beyond the history and philosophy of physics, I am also interested in the history of philosophy, especially metaphysics and logic as theorized in the German Idealist tradition. I have a reading of Kant's Second Analogy of Experience that finds it offering resources to establish that particular laws of nature hold of their objects necessarily, because those laws and objects are co-individuating. Notably, while Kant took those laws to be deterministic, we need not do so to retain the basic view; developing just how this would go is a prospective research project of mine. I also have work in progress building on this view that shows how it makes sense of "partial cognition" of particular laws of nature and "approximation" of our cognition to nomic necessity, in a way largely friendly to Necessitation Accounts of Kant on laws but that finds, as Michael Friedman urges, the necessity attaching to such laws to be conferred by the understanding. I am also interested in Kant's thought on self-consciousness or the self-reflexive character of thinking in its intuitionless purity (that of the original-synthetic unity of apperception); I take it that making sense of this aspect of Kant's thought and its role in the critical philosophy is key for understanding how it critically transforms pre-critical metaphysics and for ways post-Kantian thinkers develop the critical philosophy. I have some work in progress that (admittedly heterodoxically) reads Wittgenstein's Tractatus as converging with Kant's position here and makes the case that Kant's critical philosophy must at least implicitly be an exercise of thinking in its intuitionless purity thinking itself.
I am interested in further researching the Tractatus in light of this finding (which focuses on the picture theory and the status of Tractarian nonsense therein), especially its views of logical complexity, of causality, and of ethics and freedom of the will. More ambitiously, I would like to study Hegel more seriously with a view of comparing and contrasting his philosophy, focused on pure thinking thinking itself, with those of Kant and Wittgenstein. A more local point I would like to explore is comparing and contrasting Kant's and Hegel's conception of essence, after further developing my work on Kant on particular laws so as to better understand what Kant means by "real essence."
As somebody who has largely recovered from a near-decade long affliction with fibromyalgia, I also have a personal lens I would like to bring to bear on the philosophy of disability. I am particular interested to consider dimensions of self-knowledge and other-knowledge of invisible disabilities and attendant ethical issues.
Hall, Z. Kant on Causality: The Nomologically-Determined Object View. (Forthcoming in Proceedings of the 2024 Kant Congress)
Works in Progress:
Hall, Z. Kant on Material Unity, Systematicity, and Progressive Approximation of Nomic Necessity.
Hall, Z. and Engelman, R. Nonsense and the Supersensible Reality of Thinking: Re-Reading Wittgenstein's "Picture Theory."
Talks:
Freedom and the Supersensible Reality of Thinking in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
-Realismus and Idealismus heute III Kolloquium, Universität Bonn, 04. Mai, 2023
-Research Colloquium of Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn, May 22, 2023
-Forms of Thought: From Classical German to Early Analytic Philosophy, University of Stuttgart, July 1, 2024
-Metaphysics and Freedom Conference, German Philosophy Group at Stanford University, March 14, 2025
An Immanent Critique of Many-Worlds Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, or: On the Reality of Quantum Jumps. Bonn History and Philosophy of Physics Research Seminar, May 16, 2023
Comments on "Grammar and Method in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations," Pacific APA in Portland, OR, March 21, 2024
Non-Living Natural Kinds and the Material Unity of Nature in the Critical Philosophy, Kant and Hegel on Objectivity and Nature Workshop, Stanford University, November 16, 2024
I have served as a teaching assistant at Stanford University on six occasions: once on the history and philosophy of spacetime and gravitational physics, three times on the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics, once for mathematical logic, and once for an introductory, writing-intensive course on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. I will be the primary instructor for an introductory course on the philosophy of science in the summer session of 2025 at Stanford. I also taught high-school mathematics for one year prior to starting my PhD, focusing on making the learning fun with applied problems from my background in astrophysics (BA from Boston University, 2017). For more information, see my CV.
I have also developed user-interactive Java applications and one Javascript page to help learn Special and General Relativity. The applications help visualize thought experiments offered by Hermann Bondi in his "Relativity and Common Sense"; the Javascript page is a three-dimensional visualization of the "frame-dragging" effect of General Relativity, as represented in a near-field, low-velocity limit around a perfectly spherical body with the mass and radius of the Earth. A more detailed description of each is available here. There, you will also find a link to a lesson (direct link here) that explains how the applications can be used, how they help illustrate the lines of thinking in Bondi's book, a development of these lines of thinking to help develop and intuitive visual understanding of Minkowski spacetime, as well as the paper deriving the equations used in the Javascript page. You will also be able to download the applications on the lesson page, or run them directly in your browser in a separate tab.
Here are direct links to use the applications in your browser (each link opens a new tab):
Each file will download as a .zip file; unzip the file and run the .jar file in the resulting folder. (Latest version of Java required.) Note that the .jar files are unsigned (but are safe to run)---look up how to open unsigned .jar files on your OS to run them.
And here are links directly to the frame-dragging simulation and the supporting paper:
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i = 0;
while (!deck.isInOrder()) {
print 'Iteration ' + i;
deck.shuffle();
i++;
}
print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';
