Grasping Reality, Fall 2024 / 2023 / 2022.
A first course in metaphysics and epistemology for majors. The focus was on examining metaphysical questions through an epistemological and methodological lens. Topics included Quinean and Carnapian meta-ontologies, with an emphasis on the analysis of language and the empiricism/anti-empiricism debate; abstract objects and knowledge thereof; grounding and the relevance of inference to the best explanation; composition, the cogito objection to mereological nihilism, and the concern that commonsense views are too anthropocentric; time, time bias, and the experience of time's passage; and modality and its connection to counterfactual thinking.
Introduction to Moral Philosophy, Fall 2025 / 2022, Spring 2020 / 2017 (Also taught under the course listings "Ethics" and "Introduction to Philosophical Problems.")
An introductory course on ethics. Topics include realism and anti-realism; God and morality; utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics; the moral significance of killing vs. letting die; abortion; animal rights; immigration; and whether morality is a source of categorical reasons.
Introduction to Philosophy, Fall 2022 / 2020. (Also taught under the course listing "Introduction to Philosophical Problems.")
An introductory course on philosophy. Topics included the existence of God, the requirements of morality, the meaning of life, the possibility of knowledge, the mind’s relationship to the body, and free will. The textbook is John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer’s Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings.
Introduction to Philosophy of Mind, Spring 2024 / Fall 2018. (Also taught under the course listing "Minds, Brains, and Persons.")
A course surveying the mind-body problem, personal identity, and freedom of the will. Topics included physicalist and dualist theories of mental phenomena; psychological, physiological, and other criteria of personal identity; and compatibilist, libertarian, and illusionist views on free will.
Mathematical Logic, Summer 2019.
An intensive three-week course in formal logic for gifted teenagers. The course covered both propositional logic and predicate calculus. Topics included natural deduction, truth trees, structures, axiomatic proofs in propositional logic, Curry's paradox, the Liar paradox, Cantor's theorem, Peano Arithmetic and non-standard models thereof, modal operators, and metalogical results such as decidability / undecidability, soundness, and completeness.
Medical Ethics, Fall 2025 / 2024 / 2023, Spring 2025 / 2024 / 2023.
An introductory course to medical ethics. The major components are a brief overview of ethics, introducing students to utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue theory; medical controversies related to life and death, including the distinction between killing and letting die, abortion, euthanasia, and advance directives; patient rights and autonomy, including patient confidentiality, informed consent, organ donation, and experimentation with human subjects; and genetic engineering.
Moral Philosophy, Spring 2024 / 2023.
A course in ethics for majors. The course is divided into two major sections: metaethics and normative ethics. The metaethics section focuses on moral realism, non-cognitivism, error theory, and relativism. The normative ethics section examines consequentialism, deontology, and virtue theory in detail.
Moral Problems, Spring 2020 / Fall 2019.
A course on contemporary moral controversies. Topics included abortion, animal rights, euthanasia, obligations to the poor, genetic engineering, immigration, patriotism, gun control, capital punishment, and the force of moral reasons. I also taught a truncated version of this course, Political Moral Problems, as an "emergency class" for those whose study abroad programs were cancelled mid-semester due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Philosophy of Horror, Spring 2025 / 2024.
A course on philosophical issues raised by horror films. Topics included the paradox of horror, the ethics of watching horror, the nature of horror-comedy, and a variety of normative issues present in such films as Dawn of the Dead, Get Out, Häxan, It Follows, and The VVitch.
Referee for the American Philosophical Quarterly, the Australasian Journal of Logic, Dialectica, Erkenntnis, MIND, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, and The Philosophical Quarterly.
Organizer, Panel on Data Ethics for Kansas State's "AI and the Future Symposium", October 2023.
Referee, 8th Annual Notre Dame/Northwestern Graduate Epistemology Conference, April 2017.
Editorial Assistant, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, July 1, 2015-June 30, 2016.