Dean Zimmerman grew up in
Zimmerman is founding editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, and has co-edited several other volumes: The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (
Zimmerman’s current research includes an exploration of the metaphysics of human persons, emphasizing the difficulties confronting the more flatfootedly materialistic accounts of our nature; and the defence of an "A-theory" of time (according to which there is a "privileged present"), with special attention to God’s relationship to the temporal order.
Selected Publications
“Two Cartesian Arguments for the Simplicity of the Soul”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3 (July, 1991), pp. 217-226. [Reprinted in Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, edited by David Robb and Timothy O’Connor (
“Theories of Masses and Problems of Constitution”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 104, No. 1 (January, 1995), pp. 53-110.
“Theology and Tense” (with Roderick M. Chisholm), Noûs, Vol. 31, No. 2 (June, 1997), pp. 262-265.
“The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: The ‘Jumping Elevator’ Model”, Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 16, No. 2 (April, 1999), pp. 194-212.
“God Inside Time and Before Creation”, in God and Time, ed. by Greg Ganssle and David Woodruff (
“Material People”, in Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, edited by Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman (
“Should a Christian Be a Mind-Body Dualist?”, in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, ed. by Michael Peterson and Ray Van Arragon (
“The A-theory of Time, the B-theory of Time, and ‘Taking Tense Seriously’”, Dialectica, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2005), pp. 401-57.
“Dispatches from the Zombie Wars” (review of Gregg Rosenberg, A Place for Consciousness; and Daniel Dennett, Sweet Dreams), The Times Literary Supplement, No.5378 (April 28, 2006), pp. 8-9.