Zach sitting in McCorkle Place

Email: zthornton@vt.edu

zacthorn@live.unc.edu (soon to be defunct)

Pronouns: He/him/his

CV

Zach Thornton 

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech. I earned my Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2024 and my B.A. at Michigan State University in 2017. During fall of 2022, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia.


I work primarily in metaphysics, particularly on issues related to identity and distinctness. My paper "The Identity of Necessary Indiscernibles" develops and defends a novel general metaphysically explanatory account of identity and distinctness facts. It is forthcoming in Philosophers' Imprint. In other work, I explore issues related to what makes survival distinctively and first-personally significant, and issues arising from conflicts between the granularity of our representations of the world and the granularity of the world itself. 


In addition to my work in metaphysics, I also have projects in epistemology, social philosophy of language, and their intersection. 


I believe games can be fun and pedagogically rich teaching tools that also help create an inclusive classroom, especially for neurodivergent students (https://stimpunks.org/gaming/). To promote the use of games in philosophical pedagogy, I have created a list of games for teaching philosophy.