I am an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where I live with my wife Angela (also a philosopher), and our sons Jack and Daniel. Before coming to the Mount at the start of 2010, I was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley, where I wrote a dissertation with Alva Noë and John Campbell. Before that I was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Notre Dame, and before that I earned my B.A. from the School of Philosophy at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

My current research is focused on a number of issues in epistemology, the philosophy of mind and action, and the relationships between philosophy and the cognitive sciences. (You can read more about it here.) It helps me to think of that research as oriented around three propositions:

1. We can best understand what human action is by seeing how it relates to self-knowledge.
2. We can best understand the nature of self-knowledge and self-awareness by considering them in connection with human agency, and not insisting that they must arise from any special non-perceptual sources.
3. We can best understand many philosophical matters by considering them in light of relevant empirical findings, especially for my purposes ones in cognitive psychology.

Those claims seem to me to offer a decent approximation of the kind of philosopher I am! For another such approximation, here are some of my recent publications:

• Review of Ford, Hornsby, and Stoutland, eds., Essays on Anscombe's 'Intention', forthcoming in the Journal of Moral Philosophy
• 'The Objects of Bodily Awareness', forthcoming in Philosophical Studies
• 'Does Visual Spatial Awareness Require the Visual Awareness of Space?', forthcoming in Mind and Language
• 'Perception and Practical Knowledge', Philosophical Explorations 14 (2), 137-152
  

For more about me and my work, click around this site: there is information on my research and my recent and forthcoming publications, as well as some of the teaching I do. You can also find me at the group blog "Brains", where I try to post now and then. And please feel free to e-mail me (see below) with questions about me or my research, or with requests for copies of work in progress (which I tend not to share online, out of concern for the integrity of the peer review process).

E-mail: mylastname - at - msmary - dot - edu
Phone: 301 447 5368
Fax: 301 447 5806