COSIM SAYID

Cosim Sayid is Visiting Fellow at the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. Cosim's first project there in private law deals with  the justification of strict liability for defamatory harms so as to track wrongfulness. Unlike standard approaches to tort, this takes seriously both the tortious deed and the doer of that deed; it is Janus-faced in being both retrospective and prospective. It gets specific about the nature of defamatory harm, uses cognitive science to address mindreading, and deploys the notion of cheap talk qua mechanism in discussing the kind of state that we ought to prevent and protect against.   

Cosim is addressing topics such as aboutness and legal interpretation (especially re: evidence law), the justification of strict liability in tort, the nature of contracting with others and whether a unitary treatment of that subject is possible, as well as a study of what precedent is and whether thinking of it as exclusionary reasoning is off on the wrong track.

The relationship between and language and law is of much interest to Cosim. In a paper he's now writing, Cosim uses the theory of aboutness in the philosophy of language -- with seminal work by (inter alios) Ryle, Putnam, Goodman, Lewis, and Yablo -- to try and resolve when testimony is about some subject-matter; the work on aboutness is applicable to many other areas of law, like statutory interpretation. 

Cosim was Lecturer in Philosophy at Princeton University from 2019 to 2024; he was head preceptor for courses in the introductory sequence in analytic philosophy (Logic, Moral Philosophy, Metaphysics and Epistemology). With Michael Smith, he gave an upper-division course in Systematic Ethics. 

Joint work with Yuval Abrams (Michigan State, Law) is also under way, including a defense of the claim that to prove some legal claim, it must, in a sense to be glossed qua explanatoriness, be the best explanation for the evidence. Joint work is nearly completed on a paper defending the somewhat controversial doctrine of market-share liability in terms of doing corrective justice in accordance with the structure of tort law.

Cosim wrote a piece about knowledge-norms and the mere likelihood evidentiary standard that's applicable in most common-law civil matters; it's now published. It's part of Cosim's interest in issues at the intersection of language and norms. Cosim is writing up an account of lying that takes seriously the semantics of ascribing lying, and which uncovers a species of lying that has not received as much attention in its moral dimensions.

Cosim received his PhD from the City University of New York in September 2019. Cosim's doctoral dissertation -- Intention and Interpretation in Law -- was on interpretation and meaning in legal contexts; his committee was composed of Noël Carroll (Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, City University of New York) and Jeremy Waldron (University Professor of Law and Philosophy, New York University); his adviser was Stephen Neale (Kornblith Family Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy).

As a grad student, Cosim gave instruction in Cultural Diversity, Philosophy, and Political Science at York College, a Thurgood Marshall College Fund member-school, where he was also Quantitative Reasoning Fellow in the Department of Math and Computer Science. Cosim also taught in the Rutgers-Merck Summer Bioethics Institute at Rutgers-Newark (directed by Jeff Buechner) for college-bound urban youth in northern New Jersey; he is interested in questions in bioethics as well as other areas in applied moral philosophy.

Before coming to philosophy, Cosim worked as a lawyer in New York private practice (mostly handling litigation in real estate and securities, though he did a variety of pro bono work ranging from helping indigent couples divorce (relatively) amicably to working on the case (eventually settled) against monopoly telecom providers for New York correctional facilities that charged over 600% the usual rate for collect calls). As an undergrad, Cosim did research in biophysical chemistry. 

(Cosim usually doesn't refer to himself in the third-person, but this helps search engine robots.)

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