In the fall 2009, I will be a graduate student in the philosophy department at Princeton University. In May 2009 I received an MA from the philosophy department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before coming to the Great Plains, I graduated from Arizona State University with Bachelor of Arts degrees in Philosophy and Political Science. My main interests are in metaethics and epistemology. I am interested mainly in normative reasons, rationality, and normativity. Being interested in these topics makes me interested in all sorts of other things, including the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of language, normative ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics (so pretty much all of philosophy). 

Below I outline some of my projects.

rationality

First, I have been thinking about the relationships between normative reasons and rationality. I have argued that there is a tight connection between correctly responding to reasons and rationality (see, e.g., 'Correctly Responding to Reasons and Internalism about Rationality'). This conclusion is obvious to many epistemologists (although most don't accept my account of reasons). However, it is far from orthodox in the metaethics literature. A cursory goal of my current research is to explore some methodological assumptions that metaethicists make that are tendentious to epistemologists, and vice versa. The result of this part of my research is part of a unified account of rationality (by unified, I mean one that covers action, belief, desire, hope etc.).

A second main project, one that complements the first, has to do with coherence requirements of rationality. This project seeks to answer some related questions such as: If one believes that one ought to X, is it the case that one ought to X? Or: If one believes one ought to X and that in order to X one must Y, is it the case that one ought to Y? Or, finally: If one believes X and believes that Y follows from X, is it the case that one ought to believe Y? If we focus on a certain data set, the intuitive answer to these questions is No. However, if we examine a different data set the intuitive answer is Yes. I have argued that the answer is Yes. But, unfortunately, that doesn't answer another important question--viz. in what way are these requirements normative? This answer, I think, hasn't been adequately answered by those who wish to answer Yes. I aim to get clear on what is at issue in the debate about the normativity of coherence requirements.

the reasons program

I am in general interested in investigating the plausibility of The Reasons Program, which holds that what it is to be normative is to be analyzed in terms of normative reasons. I am working on a few things that directly tackle the question of whether The Reasons Program is plausible. 

the ontology of motivating/normative reasons

I have actively been thinking about what constitutes motivating/normative reasons for action. I want to defend the view that we should think that both kinds of reasons are constituted by propositions. I argue that this view is the only view that doesn't require us to significantly revise our philosophy of mind and epistemology. Moreover, I argue that the traditional arguments for other views are specious.

ignorance and obligation

I've recently started several papers on how ignorance affects obligation. The general question is whether being ignorant of certain normatively relevant facts affects what one ought to do. A large, quite dominant tradition in moral philosophy has it that ignorance never affects obligation. I find this view incredibly puzzling. I argue that ignorance does affect obligation. I have several different types of argument for this conclusion spread out across several papers.

epistemology of philosophy

My colleague Adam Thompson and I have just started a potentially large project about some issues in the epistemology of philosophy. We have a draft of one of these papers that argues against views of intuitions that hold  (1) intuitions themselves are evidence and (2) intuitions are unique psychological states caused by some unique faculty of intuition. We think that this has some upshot in the debate in the so-called experimental philosophy literature on the justificatory value of intuitions. We are currently writing a follow up to the first paper wherein we argue that some of our other faculties play the role that intuition is supposed to play in traditional methodology. Thus, we are ultimately sympathetic to traditional methodology. That said, we think that much of the debate focuses on the wrong issues.

other

For more, see my other pages:

CV: html, pdf

For drafts and abstracts of my published and working papers, go here.

For some of my ramblings, see my blog: The Excluded Middle.

For some pictures, go here.

Upcoming Talks: