•  1619
    On Making Sense of Oneself: Reflections on Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending
    Philosophy and Literature 39 (1A): 106-121. 2015.
    Life can be awful. For this to be the stuff of tragedy and not farce, we require a capacity to be more than we presently are. Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, poses a challenge to this commitment of ethics in his commentary on the instability of memory. But Barnes leads us past this difficulty by showing us that Tony’s real problem is his inability to make sense of himself—a failure of self-knowledge. Tony’s past is tangled up with others he can scarcely see …Read more
  •  283
    A Defense of Aristotelian Justice
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Aristotle’s account of the virtue of justice has been regarded as one of the least successful aspects of his ethics. Among the most serious criticisms lodged against his views are (i) that he fails to identify the proper subject matter of justice (LeBar 2020), (ii) that he wrongly identifies the characteristic motives relevant for justice and injustice (Williams 1980), and (iii) that his account is parochial, i.e., that it fails to correctly recognize or characterize our obligations of justice t…Read more
  •  106
    Every Man a Legislator: Aristotle on Political Wisdom
    Apeiron 52 (4): 395-414. 2019.
    I argue that Aristotle’s unmodern conception of politics can only be understood by first understanding his distinctive picture of human agency and the excellence of political wisdom. I therefore undertake to consider three related puzzles: why at the outset of the Nicomachean Ethics [NE] is the human good said to be the same for a city and for an individual, such that the NE’s inquiry is political? why later on in the NE is political wisdom said to be the same state of soul as practical wisdom? …Read more
  •  29
  •  29
    Reciprocity and Political Justice in Nicomachean Ethics Book V
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 104 (1): 53-73. 2022.
    The profusion of senses of justice in NE V.1–7 has left many readers with a general impression of chaos, but also gives rise to pressing questions about Aristotle’s conception of justice. Specifically, why does Aristotle claim that there are two parts to justice as equality, but go on to discuss three types of equality in the subsequent chapters? What is the relationship between political justice and the distinction between general justice and particular justice? I argue in this essay that the n…Read more