Meet Joel de Lara, PhD, MA

Joel de Lara is a postdoctoral fellow at Ethics Lab, where he teaches courses on data ethics, assists with the development of best pedagogical practices, and helps the team think through ethical issues in tech and society. De Lara’s research elaborates and defends a methodologically “non-ideal” approach to philosophy of language, which he argues provides a perspicuous framework for making sense of how we use words and the ways in which they can constitute and cause ethical and political harms.

De Lara earned his PhD from The New School, where he was a Prize Fellow and was awarded the Hans Jonas Award in Philosophy for his dissertation, which provides a novel speech act account of epistemic testimony. He originally hails from England where he earned an MA in Philosophy from the University of London and a BA in Philosophy from Durham University.