I am an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. I work in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, informed by a reading of German and American philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. I am currently participating in Jarda Peregrin's research project on Inferentialism Naturalized: Norms, Meanings, and Reasons in a Natural World. I published a monograph in 2022, The Single-Minded Animal: Shared Intentionality, Normativity, and the Foundations of Discursive Cognition.

In  addition to university teaching, I have designed and participated in a number of programs to bring philosophy to populations outside the university. This includes: programs for middle school and high school students in Pennsylvania, Montana, and the Czech Republic (ongoing); as the program manager and instructor for Critical Thinking about Social Media, a project to bring media literacy into middle school and high school classrooms in Montana, supported by Humanities Montana and hosted by the Center for Science, Technology, Ethics, and Society at Montana State University, from October of 2021 to December of 2022; a philosophy of science course at the Ganden Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Exile in India in the summer of 2019; and a course on Aristotelian virtue, Kantian autonomy, and cognitive behavioral therapy at the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, 2016-17.

Here is a short interview (and for download). Here is a longer interview, concerning an essay I wrote  for Civil American on education as a resource for addressing political polarization in the U.S. (the essay is available under the "Public Essays" link above).

(Of my parents and grandparents, only my paternal grandmother, Joan Stovall, was born outside Montana. She moved there from New England in 1947 to "meet a cowboy" and teach German in the Modern Languages Department at Montana State University, Bozeman – which at the time was the Montana College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. She got what she wanted, as my paternal grandfather, Jess, was a ranch hand and railroad worker who, as a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps, helped build up infrastructure in southwestern Montana during the depression. Jess was a character, a bit rough around the edges but a good man. If you're interested in seeing what they were like, here is a link to a page with some pictures, their obituaries, and an interview of Jess from 1988 with the Montana Historical Society's Oral History Project on the CCC. And that's their Chevy truck in the banner above.)

preston.stovall[at]uhk.cz