•  317
    Moral Worth and Skillful Action
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or archery, creditw…Read more
  •  516
    In Defense of Constitutivism About Epistemic Normativity
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 103 (2): 232-258. 2022.
    Epistemic constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the …Read more
  •  630
    Is Epistemic Competence a Skill?
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3): 509-523. 2022.
    Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill —such as archery, playing baseball, or chess. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skilful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues…Read more
  •  761
    How Reasoning Aims at Truth
    Noûs 55 (1): 221-241. 2021.
    Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one t…Read more
  •  111
    Enkratic Agency
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (1): 47-67. 2017.
    An enkratic agent is someone who intends to do A because she believes she should do A. Being enkratic is usually understood as something rationality requires of you. However, we must distinguish between different conceptions of enkratic rationality. According to a fairly common view, enkratic rationality is solely a normative requirement on agency: it tells us how agents should think and act. However, I shall argue that this normativist conception of enkratic rationality faces serious difficulti…Read more
  •  6
    Absichtliches Handeln
    Mentis. 2012.
    In this book, I offer an account of intentional action. The book has two main parts: in the first part, I discuss and criticize the currently prevailing account of intentional action—the Causal Theory of Action (CTA)—and, in the second part, I offer my alternative account. The CTA proposes essentially two conditions for something that you do to be an intentional action: (1) what you do is represented by your intention (or other mental attitudes), and (2) it is caused by your intention. Against t…Read more
  •  194
    Actions and accidents
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (3): 300-325. 2015.
    In acting intentionally, it is no accident that one is doing what one intends to do. In this paper, I ask how to account for this non-accidentality requirement on intentional action. I argue that, for systematic reasons, the currently prevailing view of intentional action – the Causal Theory of Action – is ill-equipped to account for it. I end by proposing an alternative account, according to which an intention is a special kind of cause, one to which it is essential that it represents its effec…Read more
  •  32
    Handlungen, Absichten und praktisches Wissen
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 61 (3): 373-386. 2013.
    In this paper, I argue that in order to understand intentional action we have to understand a distinctive kind of practical knowledge - knowledge that is the cause of what it represents. To do so, I begin by identifying two requirements for an adequate understanding of intentional action: someone who acts intentionally has an intention that is the cause of her action; someone who acts intentionally knows what she is doing. My aim is to show that a theory of intentional action that adequately acc…Read more
  •  40
    Schwerpunkt: Praktisches Wissen
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 61 (3): 353-356. 2013.