I'm Spencer Case. Welcome to my professional webpage! I'm currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, or Freedom Center, as it's more casually known. I live here in Tucson with my wife, May, and our two wonderful children, Eli and Nathan. Let me say a bit about my works and background.

I recently completed my my first single-author book, Why It's Ok to Be Patriotic, which is published through Routledge, and will be available to buy on October 15 (but wait until you can buy the paperback at a reasonable price! Early reviews have been enouraging, so I'm excited to see it's finally coming out. I'm also coauthor, along with Matt Lutz, of Is Morality Real? A Debate, also published through Routledge (2023), which you can buy here. I'm proud of that one, too! 

In addition to these books, I've got about ten publications in peer-reviewed journals (not counting book reviews) and myriad reviews and pieces of public commentary, many of which are linked on this website. My main philosophical research area is the nature of normativity (i.e., "ought-ness"), but I've got interests in other areas, too, including in war ethics and the normativity of epistemology (i.e., why we have reasons to believe some things and not others). My big current project is a paper defending epistemic moralism, the view that our reasons for believing some things and not others are ultimately a species of moral reason.


​I'm the host of Micro-Digressions: A Philosophy Podcast, which releases a new episode monthly. My new slogan for the podcast is: "The meandering path is the straightest road to wisdom." The topics covered include social-political issues ranging from political correctness and gender identity to the Iran war. As of this writing, I've published 79 episodes.

I can't complain of a boring life. I'm a veteran of the U.S. Army and I deployed twice as part of the Global War on Terrorism: to Iraq (2005-2006) and to Afghanistan (2009-10). In 2012, I received a Fulbright grant to study Islamic philosophy and Arabic in Egypt. I lived about a mile from Tahrir Square, the epicenter of many intense protests, and left just before the Muslim Brotherhood was toppled.
I completed my Ph.D. in philosophy at the University Colorado Boulder in 2018. From 2019-2021, I was an international research fellow at Wuhan University in Wuhan, China, where I witnessed the onset of the pandemic and met my lovely wife. I was an assistant teaching professor at Bowling Green State University for two years before taking my current position.


I like writing, reading (especially about philosophy, history, and politics), podcasting, listening to jazz, and swing dancing. Right now, I'm also getting into playing the harmonica (both diatonic and chromatic).  The video up top was made by an artist who goes by the name Train of Thoughts, who you can support here, based on an essay of mine at 1,000 Word Philosophy which you can read here. The narration in the video is my own.  The other pictures here are of me, my wife, May, and Eli..