Rate My Professor John Park

John Park is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Sacramento. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Duke University. His academic interests include political philosophy, Asian philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. Park's research explores intersections of moral psychology, empirical findings in cognitive science, and philosophical arguments concerning atheism, consciousness, free will, and democratic theory. He investigates arguments for the existence of God and free will through the lens of mathematical psychology and computational decision-making processes.

Park authored the book The Psychological Basis of Moral Judgments (Routledge), which applies theories of concepts from philosophy of mind and cognitive science to moral concepts, addressing implications for normative ethics, moral semantics, and moral truth. He has a book under contract with Oxford University Press titled Beyond Democracy, Toward Meritocracy, proposing a hybrid political philosophy that integrates Confucian meritocracy with Western democracy, drawing on empirical political psychology. His peer-reviewed publications include 'Why Regulations on Empirical Claims in the Media are Justified' (The Philosophical Quarterly, 2024), 'Confucian Meritocratic Democracy over Democracy for Minority Interests and Rights' (Dao, 2024), 'The Mental & Physical Health Argument Against Hate Speech' (Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics, 2023), 'THE BEST CONFUCIAN HYBRID MERITOCRACY-DEMOCRACY FOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES' (Comparative Philosophy, 2023), 'Why Meritocratic Democracy is Better Than Democracy' in The Crisis of American Democracy (2021), 'The Problem of Error: The Moral Psychology Argument for Atheism' (Erkenntnis, 2018), 'The Kalām Cosmological Argument, the Big Bang, and Atheism' (Acta Analytica, 2016), 'THE MORAL EPISTEMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR ATHEISM' (European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2015), 'Folk Moral Relativism' (Mind & Language, 2011), and others on topics such as the hard problem of consciousness, theories of moral concepts, and patent ethics. Park maintains high teaching evaluations, averaging between 4 and 5 out of 5 across categories.