Kevin Scharp

About Me

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri where I grew up and attended Washington University. In 1991 I earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. I decided on a career in philosophy late in my undergraduate career, so after graduation I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to attend the master’s program in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. I wrote my thesis on William James with Robert Schwartz as my advisor. Upon completion, I was undecided on whether I wanted to focus on analytic or continental philosophy. Instead of choosing between them, I decided on the PhD program at Northwestern, which, at that time, was strong in both traditions. While at Northwestern I settled on analytic philosophy, but by then, the analytic wing of the department had collapsed. I transferred to the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, where I wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Robert Brandom. Once the dissertation was defended, I took a position as an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University in 2005. In 2010, I was promoted to Associate Professor, and then to Full in 2014. In 2016 I made the move to the University of St Andrews where I was the Director of the Arché Philosophical Research Centre and supervisor of the Conceptual Engineering Research Seminar, for five years. In 2022, I left St Andrews for the University of Twente and the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technology (ESDIT) project. In addition to doing philosophy, I create content (video, podcast, blog) and I do computational finance (algorithmic derivatives trading).

My partner, Alison Duncan Kerr, and I currently live in Scotland with our three children. We love to play in the outdoors, including hiking, camping, backpacking, canoeing, and climbing.