University of Chicago
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2006
Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action
Meta-Ethics
  •  201
    What is gay and lesbian philosophy?
    Metaphilosophy 39 (4-5): 433-471. 2008.
    Abstract: This essay explores recent trends and major issues related to gay and lesbian philosophy in ethics (including issues concerning the morality of homosexuality, the natural function of sex, and outing and coming out); religion (covering past and present debates about the status of homosexuality and how biblical and qur'anic passages have been interpreted by both sides of the debate); the law (especially a discussion of the debates surrounding sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and its impact…Read more
  •  294
    In his 'Of the Standard of Taste' David Hume seems to make the paradoxical claim that even though the sentiments an agent feels in response to an artwork are subjective and unique, and it cannot be said that such sentiments are either correct or incorrect, there is a standard upon which art can be judged, which is at least partly determined by these sentiments.
  •  12
    Yoga, like the other five orthodox schools or darśanas of Hindu philosophy, is primarily soteriological in purpose; it offers the hope of salvation from the inevitable suffering of life and the cycle of death and rebirth more broadly. Unlike the other darśanas, its prescribed method for achieving this salvation is meditation, by which the practitioner focuses his or her attention so as to become undisturbed by the fluctuations of his or her own consciousness caused by stimuli in the external wor…Read more
  •  64
    The wisdom of hindsight and the limits of Humean constructivism
    Philosophical Explorations 18 (1): 45-57. 2015.
    Ordinary normative discourse includes talk about the reasons for action we had in the past but only came to discover in hindsight. In some cases, we come to discover these reasons not because new information has come to light, but because our values have changed. Contemporary metaethical views, namely Street's Humean constructivism and Blackburn's and Gibbard's quasi-realism, have some difficulty accounting for these reasons and the claims we make about them. This difficulty hinges on the diachr…Read more
  •  7
    Building Practical Coherence over Time
    Southwest Philosophy Review 27 (1): 111-117. 2011.
  •  58
    Repression and external reasons
    Journal of Value Inquiry 43 (4): 433--446. 2009.
    Even though it is relative to his motivational set, a reason to overcome repression is external in the sense that an agent cannot correctly deliberate about it. If he could correctly deliberate about it, he would already have overcome his repression and therefore would lose his reason to do so. Such cases stand as counterexamples to arguments about the existence of external reasons. For example, in their now famous debate, John McDowell concludes there are while Bernard Williams concludes there …Read more
  •  18
    This book argues that sometimes we have reasons to overcome repression and that these reasons are unlike any other reasons for action typically recognized by philosophers.