 I'm a 5th year graduate student at UC Riverside. My research focuses on issues in human agency at the intersection of ethics, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. In my dissertation entitled, Strawsonian Libertarianism I develop a novel, reductive libertarian account of free agency that grounds itself in P.F. Strawson's distinctive account of, and approach to, moral responsibility. I argue that, despite most philosophers’ contention, a detailed consideration of our practices of holding others responsible will inevitably lead to a libertarian conception of the conditions under which this stance is appropriate. But I contend that this does not commit us to a “panicky metaphysics” because a libertarian conception of free will and moral responsibility can be given wholly in naturalistic terms—reducing the agent’s making something happen to states of, and events involving, the agent making something happen. Strawsonian libertarianism, I claim, allows us to combine Strawson’s important insights about our practices of holding responsible while offering a more robust, phenomenologically accurate account of free agency than is available to compatibilists.
I also have interests in issues concerning weakness of will, desert and responsibility, virtue and character, the moral emotions, the foundations of normativity, mental causation, the nature of the self as well as early modern figures such as Descartes, Hume and Reid.
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