Papers by Topic

See my CV for citation details.

Love

• "Love and Free Will"

• "In Defense of the No-Reasons View of Love"

• "The Power to Make Others Worship"

Pleasure

• "The Feels Good Theory of Pleasure"

Welfare, Meaning, and Worth

• "To Be of Never to Have Been: Benatar and the Worth of a Life"

• "The Good Cause Account of the Meaning of Life"

• "A Life Worth Living"

• "Welfare and Painful Art"

• "Is it Better to Like Better Things?"

• "Five Tests for What Makes a Life Worth Living"

Death and Immortality

• "Less Good but not Bad: In Defense of Epicureanism about Death"

• "Immortality and Significance"

• "'Wings of Desire': Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality"

Philosophy of Film

• "Cinematic"

• "'Pickman's Model': Horror and the Objective Purport of Photographs"

• "The Ghost is the Thing: Can Fiction Reveal Audience Belief?"

• "Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis"

• "The Desire-Frustration Theory of Suspense"

• "V. F. Perkins' Functional Credibility and the Problem of Imaginative Resistance"

• "The Paradox of Suspense"

Popular Art

• "Horror"

• "Popular Art"

• "Are Video Games Art?"

• "What is Interactivity?"

• "Video Games and the Philosophy of Art"

Art and Morality

• "Grounding Moralism: Moral Flaws and Aesthetic Properties"

• "Do Moral Flaws Enhance Amusement?"

• "The Salacious and the Satirical: In Defense of Symmetric Comic Moralism"

• "Pleasurably Regarding the Fictional Pain of Others"

• "How Not to Defend Response Moralism"

• "The Ethics of Singing Along: The Case of 'Mind of a Lunatic'"

Humor

• "Do Moral Flaws Enhance Amusement?"

• "The Ethics of Humor: Can Your Sense of Humor be Wrong?"

• "The Salacious and the Satirical: In Defense of Symmetric Comic Moralism"

• "The Joke is the Thing: 'In the Company of Men' and the Ethics of Humor"

• "Humor"

The Paradox of Painful Art

• "Rubber Ring: Why do We Listen to Sad Songs?

• "The Paradox of Painful Art"

• "Art and Negative Affect"

• "Welfare and Painful Art"