My dissertation, which I successfully defended in December 2025, is titled Der Ausdruck eines Inhaltes zur Einsicht: On the Semiotics of Frege's Begriffsschrift. Its burden is to uncover, articulate, and explain the significance of a certain philosophically deep rationale for Frege's having designed his logico-mathematical writing system to be a two-dimensional, diagrammatic one. This particular rationale is as under-appreciated in Frege scholarship as it is consequential beyond the bounds of it.
Beyond this and other related aspects of Frege's thought, I have serious research interests in Kant's philosophy of mathematics, semiotics, and account of reason, and in exploring their various reciprocal influences. What is it for concepts to be "made sensible," and why would it be that they need to be such? What does it say about thinking that Kant explains it in terms of speaking? What does our capacity for intuition contribute to reason's publicity and self-development?
Characterized most broadly, my research is oriented toward understanding how human practices, institutions, and folkways are, and ought to be, developed in light of the nature and features of our embodied, intelligent receptivity and sociality. Thus, I also like to think about the political economics, ethics, and aesthetics of material culture and technology, especially about how they can influence not only our capacity for understanding but also for freedom, love, care, conviviality, grace, suffering, and appreciation of beauty.
My teaching is focused on more difficult matters: giving students who have never encountered it before a taste for philosophy. I can teach courses in logic, critical thinking, philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, ethics, existentialism & phenomenology, the meaning of life, aesthetics & philosophy of art, and political theory, law, & society. I have recently developed courses on the nature, limits, and ethics of algorithms, metrics, and data. To any course I teach, I incorporate a historical approach, because I believe students should appreciate how so many of the concepts through which we understand ourselves and our world have a history.
