Rate My Professor Samuel Baron

Samuel Baron is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2012, specializing in philosophy at the Centre for Time. His career trajectory includes serving as Research Associate (2012) and Postdoctoral Fellow (2013-2015) at the University of Sydney, Lecturer (2014-2017), Senior Lecturer (2017-2019), and ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Senior Research Fellow (2018-2019) at the University of Western Australia. Subsequently, he held positions at the Australian Catholic University as Associate Professor of Philosophy (2020-2022), Professor of Philosophy (2022-2023), and Deputy Director of the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy (2021-2023), before taking up his current role at the University of Melbourne from 2024.

Baron's research focuses on metaphysics and epistemology of science, including the nature of mathematical explanation and its implications for mathematical objects, the emergence of spacetime in quantum gravity theories, and explainable artificial intelligence with implications for scientific epistemology and fairness. He is author or co-author of influential books such as An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time (2018, with Kristie Miller) and Out of Time: A Philosophical Study of Timelessness (2022, with Kristie Miller and Jonathan Tallant), as well as key papers including 'Temporal Experience, Temporal Passage and the Cognitive Sciences' (citation metrics: 37 Scopus) and 'The Priority of the Now' (25 Scopus citations). He has secured substantial funding from the Australian Research Council, including a Future Fellowship for 'New Causal Foundations for Space and Time' ($1,265,828), Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE180100414, $336,905), and Discovery Project (DP180100105). Baron serves as an executive member of the Australasian Association of Philosophy and is affiliated with the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. He supervises PhD students in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of AI, and engages in public outreach through contributions to The Conversation and expert commentary on topics such as AI mind-reading and gravity experiments.