The central question in my teaching is "What should I believe?" This question is not only at the heart my teaching of Epistemology, Logic, and Introduction to Philosophy, but also and especially, in my teaching Early Modern Philosophy. I regularly assign a "Belief Evaluation" task, wherein students attempt to emulate the skeptical exercise of Descartes' First Meditation. Descartes' admirable, but failed, attempt to find certain and infallible foundations for belief provides fertile ground for students to absorb the suggestion that, in many of our beliefs, we must settle for things being more or less probably true. Concerning this question, I view the British authors--Locke, Astell, Hume, Bayes, Reid--as making the great strides forward within the 17th and 18th centuries, though Leibniz, it should be noted, attempt to develop a "logic of probability" well before Locke and Bayes.    

I've been an AI fellow at Fort Lewis College's Center for Teaching and Learning from Fall '24 to Spring '26. In this role, I have explored a variety of ways of using AI to enhance teaching, I have run faculty workshops on utilizing AI in teaching, and have put together online resources for using AI. I have also developed a theory on AI value alignment (with Erich Riesen). More recently, in my research on AI, I have been impressed by the harms that can come from the frequent use of--especially in terms of students' cognitive development (i.e., neuronal connectivity, self-initiated reasoning, critical thinking, short-term memory) but also its impact on climate.