My primary research interest is the structure of agency. I approach this topic from multiple angles, which lead me to publish in several sub-fields in philosophy.
“Unbinding the Ties that Bind? Social Alienation, Commodification, and the Strength of Relationships Through the Lens of Michel Houellebecq” (forthcoming). Co-authored with Michael Friedson. Sociological Imagination.
“The Mengzi” (forthcoming). In: Malcolm Keating (ed.) Reading Primary Sources in Asian Philosophy. Bloomsbury.
"Untimely Evidence for Self-Knowledge" (2025) Res Philosophica. Special Issue on Rationality and the First Person. 102(3): 351-371.
"Dialectic Delicacies in Arguing for Agential Knowledge" (2025) Romanian Journal of Analytic Philosophy.
"The Dilemma Defense and Setting Things Aside in the Right Way" (2024) Res Philosophica 101(4): 737-752.
“Modeling the Internal Chaos” (2022). Symposium on Franz Berto. 2022. Topics of Thought: The Logic of Knowledge, Belief, and Imagination. OUP. <Part I: https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2022/10/23/book-symposium-derek-lam-commentary-and-reply; Part II: https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2022/10/23/derek-lams-2nd-commentary-and-reply>
"Real Quantitativeness: What Formal Investigations Can(not) Show" (2022) Book Review: J. E. Wolff (2020) The Metaphysics of Quantity. Metascience 31(1): 125-128. DOI: 10.1007/s11016-021-00725-1
"Stipulative Agency." (2021). Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility vol 7: 7-31.
"An Imaginative Person's Guide to Objective Modality." (2021). In: Christopher Badura & Amy Kind (ed). Epistemic Uses of Imagination. Routledge: 44-62.
"The Phenomenology and Metaphysics of the Open Future." (2021). Philosophical Studies. 178(12): 3895-3921.
"Being Pessimistic about the Objective Present." (2020) Synthese. 11311-11326.
"Metaphysics of Quantity and the Limit of Phenomenal Concept." (2019) Inquiry 62(3): 247-266.
"Is Imagination Too Liberal for Modal Epistemology?" (2018) Synthese 195(5): 2155–2174.
A paper against the existence of an agent's credence about their own current intentional actions [*]
A paper Mengzi's thought experiment about how people react to a child who is about to fall into a well [*]
A paper on the nature of paying loving attention to a loved one's shameful flaws