Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  354
    Ethics of Parasocial Relationships
    In Monika Betzler & Jörg Löschke (eds.), The Ethics of Relationships: Broadening the Scope, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    In this chapter we analyse the nature and ethical implications of parasocial relationships. While this type of relationship has received significant attention in other interdisciplinary fields such as celebrity studies and fan studies, philosophers have so far had very little to say about them. Parasocial relationships are usually defined as asymmetrical, in which a media-user closely relates to a media-personality as if they were a friend or family member, and where this connection is mostly un…Read more
  •  37
    How to Know a City: The Epistemic Value of City Tours
    Philosophy of the City Journal 1 (1): 31-41. 2023.
    When travelling to a new city, we acquire knowledge about its physical terrain, directions, historical facts and aesthetic features. Engaging in tourism practices, such as guided walking tours, provides experiences of a city that are necessarily mediated and partial. This has led scholars in tourism studies, and more recently in philosophy, to question the epistemological value of city tours, critiquingthem as passive, lacking in autonomous agency, and providing misrepresentative experiences of …Read more
  •  7
    The Medium Place
    In Kimberly S. Engels (ed.), The Good Place and Philosophy, Wiley. 2020.
    Even though The Medium Place is overshadowed by the dramatic events that unfold in the fake Good Place neighborhood, it is more significant to The Good Place. The Medium Place is described as an individually tailored “eternal mediocrity,” a place of neutrality and compromise. One of the most prominent contemporary cultural theorists, Homi K. Bhabha, calls this space of becoming, where contradictions and differences are explored rather than resolved, a “Third Space”. Bhabha claims that despite it…Read more
  •  29
    Being a Celebrity: Alienation, Integrity, and the Uncanny
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9 (4): 597-615. 2023.
    A central feature of being a celebrity is experiencing a divide between one's public image and private life. By appealing to the phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we analyze this experience as paradoxically involving both a disconnection and alienation from one's public persona and a sense of close connection with it. This ‘uncanny’ experience presents a psychological conflict for celebrities: they may have a public persona they feel alienated from and that is at the same time closely c…Read more
  •  2059
    Talent, Skill, and Celebrity
    Ethical Perspectives 29 (1): 33-63. 2022.
    A commonly raised criticism against celebrity culture is that it celebrates people who become famous without any connection to their skills, talents or achievements. A culture in which people become famous simply for being famous is criticized for being shallow and inauthentic. In this paper we offer a defence of celebrity by arguing against this criticism. We begin by outlining what we call the Talent Argument: celebrity is a negative cultural phenomenon because it creates and sustains fame wit…Read more
  •  427
    Introduction: The Morality of Fame
    Ethical Perspectives 29 (1): 1-6. 2022.
    Introduction
  •  33
    Talent dispositionalism
    Synthese 198 (9): 8085-8102. 2020.
    Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As …Read more
  •  13
    Talents play a central role in the way that we live our lives, and it is widely assumed that identifying and developing one’s talents is valuable, both for oneself and for others. Despite this, the philosophical literature is seriously lacking in its discussion of the nature and value of talent; the objective goodness of talent and its development is often assumed without an analysis of what a talent is, and the value that we place on it. This dissertation aims to provide such an analysis, offer…Read more