Ohio State University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2020
Westerville, Ohio, U.S.
  •  30
    Descartes and his critics on passions and animals
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (5): 773-796. 2022.
    Descartes’ theory of the passions has important connections to his view that nonhuman animals are automata. In this paper, I show how critics of animal automatism exploited these connections. I int...
  •  63
    Descartes on the Animal Within, and the Animals Without
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (8): 999-1014. 2020.
    Descartes held that animals are material automata without minds. However, this raises a puzzle. Descartes’s argument for this doctrine relies on the claims that animals lack language and general intelligence. But these claims seem compatible with the view that animals have minds. As a solution to this puzzle, I defend what I call theintrospective-analogicalinterpretation. According to this interpretation, Descartes employs introspection to show that certain human behaviors do not depend on thoug…Read more
  •  38
    Animals and Cartesian Consciousness: Pardies vs. the Cartesians
    Journal of Modern Philosophy 2 (1): 11. 2020.
    The Cartesian view that animals are automata sparked a major controversy in early modern European philosophy. This paper studies an early contribution to this controversy. I provide an interpretation of an influential objection to Cartesian animal automatism raised by Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673). Pardies objects that the Cartesian arguments show only that animals lack ‘intellectual perception’ but do not show that animals lack ‘sensible perception.’ According to Pardies, the difference bet…Read more