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46Masculinity and Violent ExtremismPalgrave. 2022.This book explores men's attraction to violent extremist movements and terrorism. Drawing on multi-method, interdisciplinary research, this book explores the centrality of masculinity to violent extremist recruitment narratives across the religious and political spectrum. Chapters examine the intersection of masculinity and violent extremism across a spectrum of movements including: the far right, Islamist organizations, male supremacist groups, and the far left. The book identifies key sites an…Read more
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2Online trust and distrustIn Michael Hannon & Jeroen de Ridder (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, Routledge. 2021.Trust makes cooperation possible. It enables us to learn from others and at a distance. It makes democratic deliberation possible. But it also makes us vulnerable: when we place our trust in another’s word, we are liable to be deceived—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Our evolved mechanisms for deciding whom to trust and whom to distrust mostly rely on face-to-face interactions with people whose reputation we can both access and influence. Online, these mechanisms are largely …Read more
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418Automated psycholinguistic analysis of the Anglophone manosphereIn Matthew Lindauer, James R. Beebe & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Advances in Experimental Political Philosophy, Bloomsbury. 2023.
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379Reactionary attitudes: Strawson, Twitter, and the Black Lives Matter MovementIn Fernando Aguiar-Gonzalez & Antonio Gaitan (eds.), Experimental Methods in Moral Philosophy, Routledge. forthcoming.On 25 May 2020, Officer Derek Chauvin asphyxiated George Floyd in Minneapolis — a murder that was captured in a confronting nine-minute bystander video that set off a firestorm of activity on online social networks, in the streets of the United States, and even worldwide. These protests captured the collective rage, dissatisfaction, and resentment personally and vicariously experienced towards the widespread systematic injustice and mistreatment of African Americans by police and vigilantes. The…Read more
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348Fanaticism in the manosphereIn Paul Katsafanas (ed.), Fanaticism and the History of Philosophy, Rewriting the History of Philosophy. 2023.This chapter explores a case study in contemporary fanaticism. We adopt Katsafanas’s conceptualization of fanaticism to make possible an in-depth discussion of and evaluation of a diffuse but important social movement — the anglophone manosphere. According to Katsafanas, fanatics are fruitfully understood as members of a group that adopts sacred values which they hold unconditionally to preserve their own psychic unity, and who feel that those values are threatened by those who do not accept the…Read more
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360The wisdom-of-crowds: an efficient, philosophically-validated, social epistemological network profiling toolkitIn Hocine Cherifi, Rosario Nunzio Mantegna, Luis M. Rocha, Chantal Cherifi & Salvatore Miccichè (eds.), Complex Networks and Their Applications XI: Proceedings of The Eleventh International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications: COMPLEX NETWORKS 2022 — Volume 1, Springer. 2023.The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter…Read more
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23How One Becomes What One Is Called: On the Relation between Traits and Trait-Terms in NietzscheJournal of Nietzsche Studies 46 (2): 261-269. 2015.According to Nietzsche, drives are the ultimate constituents of virtues and vices. I argue that Nietzsche identifies two blueprints for character construction: a slavish, interpersonal blueprint, and a masterly, reflexive blueprint. When the interpersonal blueprint is implemented, a person becomes what he is called: his drives are shaped by the traits ascribed to him so that he becomes more like the sort of person he’s taken to be. When the reflexive blueprint is implemented, a person becomes mo…Read more
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799Nietzsche on styleNineteenth Century Prose. forthcoming.Nietzsche talks about style [Stil and cognates] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to style in over one hundred passages. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and style includes only a handful of publications, among them Derrida’s notorious Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), which barely even engages with Nietzsche’s writings (see also Magnus 1991 and Babich 2011, 2012). Much of the rest of the literature is about Nietzsche’s style…Read more
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1Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy (edited book)Lexington. 2023.This edited volume examines the topic of trust and its place in the thought of several key figures from the history of philosophy. Drawing on thinkers and philosophical traditions from across the globe, the chapters focus especially on trust's moral and social dimensions.
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1420Nietzsche on Trust and MistrustIn Mark Alfano, David Collins & Iris Jovanovic (eds.), Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy, Lexington. 2023.Nietzsche talks about trust [vertraue*] and mistrust [misstrau*] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to trust in 90 passages and mistrust in 101 – approximately ten times as often as he refers to resentment/ressentiment. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and trust includes just a handful of publications. Worse still, I have been unable to find a single publication devoted to Nietzsche and mistrust. This chapter aims to fill the …Read more
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38Nietzsche’s Virtues: Curiosity, Courage, Pathos of Distance, Sense of Humor, and SolitudeIn Christoph Halbig & Felix Timmermann (eds.), Handbuch Tugend Und Tugendethik, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. pp. 271-286. 2021.The contours of Nietzsche’s socio-moral framework are idiosyncratic when compared to contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. Nietzsche starts with a naturalistic conception of drives, instincts, and types of people. He then moves in a normative direction by identifying some drives and instincts as virtues – at least for certain types of people in particular social and cultural contexts. Much of Nietzsche’s understanding of virtue must therefore be understood relative to a type of person and…Read more
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1349The functions of shame in NietzscheIn Raffaele Rodogno & Alessandra Fussi (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Shame, Moral Psychology of the Emotions. 2023.Nietzsche talks about shame [scham*, schmach*, schand*] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to shame in over one hundred passages – at least five times as often as he refers to resentment/ressentiment. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and shame includes just a handful of publications, while the literature on Nietzsche and resentment includes over a thousand. Arguably, this disproportionate engagement has been driven by the fact…Read more
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76Technologically scaffolded atypical cognition: the case of YouTube’s recommender systemSynthese 199 (1): 835-858. 2020.YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube’s recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served t…Read more
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515On the Uses and Abuses of Celebrity Epistemic PowerSocial Epistemology. forthcoming.The testimonies of celebrities affect the lives of their many followers who pay attention to what they say. This gives celebrities a high degree of epistemic power, which has come under close scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper investigates the duties that arise from this power. We argue that celebrities have a negative duty of testimonial justice not to undermine trust in authoritative sources by spreading misinformation or directing attention to untrustworthy sources. Moreover, c…Read more
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43Towards a Genealogy of Forward-Looking ResponsibilityThe Monist 104 (4): 498-509. 2021.I propose an account of how our forward-looking moral and epistemic responsibility practices arose, how they related to backward-looking responsibility practices, and what makes them stable. This account differs in several ways from prominent theories already in the literature. Traditionally, forward-looking accounts of responsibility are framed third-personally in terms of social control and neglect the perspective and agency of the responsible person. The account I develop allows that there ar…Read more
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64Moral Molecules: Morality as a Combinatorial SystemReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4): 1039-1058. 2022.What is morality? How many moral values are there? And what are they? According to the theory of morality-as-cooperation, morality is a collection of biological and cultural solutions to the problems of cooperation recurrent in human social life. This theory predicts that there will be as many different types of morality as there are different types of cooperation. Previous research, drawing on evolutionary game theory, has identified at least seven different types of cooperation, and used them …Read more
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13Elections, Civic Trust, and Digital Literacy: The Promise of Blockchain as a Basis for Common KnowledgeSATS 22 (1): 97-110. 2021.Few recent developments in information technology have been as hyped as blockchain, the first implementation of which was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Such hype furnishes ample reason to be skeptical about the promise of blockchain implementations, but I contend that there’s something to the hype. In particular, I think that certain blockchain implementations, in the right material, social, and political conditions, constitute excellent bases for common knowledge. As a case study, I focus on trus…Read more
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68The Development and Validation of the Epistemic Vice ScaleReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1-28. forthcoming.This paper presents two studies on the development and validation of a ten-item scale of epistemic vice and the relationship between epistemic vice and misinformation and fake news. Epistemic vices have been defined as character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. Examples of epistemic vice are gullibility and indifference to knowledge. It has been hypothesized that epistemically vicious people are especially susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy…Read more
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270The Affiliative Use of Emoji and Hashtags in the Black Lives Matter Movement in TwitterSocial Science Computer Review (N/A). 2022.Protests and counter-protests seek to draw and direct attention and concern with confronting images and slogans. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space, such images and slogans have also gone online. Two main ways in which these images and slogans are translated to the online space is through the use of emoji and hashtags. Despite sustained academic interest in online protests, hashtag activism and the use of emoji across social media platf…Read more
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118Virtues for agents in directed social networksSynthese 199 (3-4): 8423-8442. 2021.In the age of the Internet, people have increased access to information along multiple dimensions. It might seem that we are on our way to an epistemic utopia in which we spend less time and effort on basic cognitive tasks while devoting more time and effort to complex deliberation. However, though there are many accurate sources on the Internet, they must be sifted from the spammers, concern trolls, practical jokers, conspiracy theorists, counterintelligence sock-puppets, and outright liars who…Read more
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312Motivated numeracy and active reasoning in a Western European sampleBehavioral Public Policy 1. 2020.Recent work by Kahan et al. (2017) on the psychology of motivated numeracy in the context of intracultural disagreement suggests that people are less likely to employ their capabilities when the evidence runs contrary to their political ideology. This research has so far been carried out primarily in the USA regarding the liberal–conservative divide over gun control regulation. In this paper, we present the results of a modified replication that included an active reasoning intervention with Wes…Read more
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19Moral reasoning is the process of asking moral questions and answering themBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Reasoning is the iterative, path-dependent process of asking questions and answering them. Moral reasoning is a species of such reasoning, so it is a matter of asking and answering moral questions, which requires both creativity and curiosity. As such, interventions and practices that help people ask more and better moral questions promise to improve moral reasoning.
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452To Honor our Heroes: Analysis of the Obituaries of Australians Killed in Action in WWI and WWII2020 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR). 2021.Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, in particular…Read more
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19Two and a Half Cheers for Digital Humanities: Responses to Bamford, Cristy, and ReginsterJournal of Nietzsche Studies 51 (2): 265-272. 2020.ABSTRACT This article is a reply to critical commentaries by Rebecca Bamford, Rachel Cristy, and Bernard Reginster on my 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology, invited by the North American Nietzsche Society for presentation at a book symposium planned for the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
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364Comments on Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 549-554. 2020.
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28Comments on Stichter’s The Skillfulness of Virtue (review)Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (2): 549-554. 2020.
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442Elections, civic trust, and digital literacy: The promise of blockchain as a basis for common knowledgeNorthern European Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Few recent developments in information technology have been as hyped as blockchain, the first implementation of which was the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Such hype furnishes ample reason to be skeptical about the promise of blockchain implementations, but I contend that there’s something to the hype. In particular, I think that certain blockchain implementations, in the right material, social, and political conditions, constitute excellent bases for common knowledge. As a case study, I focus on trus…Read more
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748More than provocative, less than scientific: A commentary on the editorial decision to publish CofnasPhilosophical Psychology 33 (7): 893-898. 2020.This letter addresses the editorial decision to publish the article, “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” (Cofnas, 2020). Our letter points out several critical problems with Cofnas's article, which we believe should have either disqualified the manuscript upon submission or been addressed during the review process and resulted in substantial revisions.
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416Nietzsche on humility and modestyIn Justin Steinberg (ed.), Humility: A History, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.Beginning with the Untimely Meditations (1873) and continuing until his final writings of 1888-9, Nietzsche refers to humility (Demuth or a cognate) in fifty-two passages and to modesty (Bescheidenheit or a cognate) in one hundred and four passages, yet there are only four passages that refer to both terms. Moreover, perhaps surprisingly, he often speaks positively of modesty, especially in epistemic contexts. These curious facts might be expected to lead scholars to explore what Nietzsche think…Read more
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95Social Virtue Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2022.Explores the place of intellectual virtues and vices in a social world. Chapters are divided into four sections: Foundational Issues; Individual Virtues; Collective Virtues; and Methods and Measurements.
CUNY
Alumnus, 2011
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Language, Miscellaneous |
PhilPapers Editorships
Skepticism about Character |