Alice van't Hoff
Hi!
I am a postdoctoral researcher with the Phlox Research Group at the University of Vienna. Before that I was a PhD student at Princeton University. As of 2025, I will be joining the philosophy department at Texas A&M University. You can find my CV here.
My research is mainly in metaphysics and social philosophy. I am particularly interested in developing a metaphysical interpretation of existential quantification. My hunch is that higher-order quantification is both metaphysically indispensable and ontologically innocent and my current research tries to make sense of this idea. In related work, I hope to defend the possibility of quantifying over absolutely everything and suggest that while it might be true that there is a smallest prime, it needn't follow that numbers belong in our ontology.
My work in social philosophy also focuses on ontological questions, particularly about gender. I defend a realist account of gender, according to which there are socio-metaphysical facts about an individual's gender. Relatedly, I also argue that internalist accounts according to which a person's gender is a function of their identity are coherent and should be preferred over rival views. I am particularly interested in the ways that the tools and devices of contemporary analytic metaphysics can be fruitfully applied to social questions.