Syracuse University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2007
Meadville, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology
Metaphysics
  •  207
    Russell on Matter and Our Knowledge of the External World
    The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly 124. 2004.
    Bertrand Russell’s philosophy around 1914 is often interpreted as phenomenalism, the view that sensations are not caused by but rather constitute ordinary objects. Indeed, prima facie, his 1914 Our Knowledge of the External World reduces objects to sense-data. However, Russell did not think his view was phenomenalist, and he said that he never gave up either the causal theory of perception or a realist understanding of objects. In this paper I offer an explanation of why Russell might have under…Read more
  •  46
    Self-Determination in Plenitude
    Erkenntnis 87 (5): 2397-2418. 2022.
    On a plenitudinous ontology, in every filled region of spacetime, there is at least one object that’s ‘exactly then and there’; one per each modal profile that the matter in the region satisfies. One of the strongest arguments for plenitude, the “argument from anthropocentrism”, puts pressure on us to accept that members of different communities correctly self-identify under different subject concepts. I explore this consequence and offer an account of selves on which self-determination is both …Read more
  •  32
    The Sorites Paradox in Metaphysics
    In Sergi Oms & Elia Zardini (eds.), The Sorites Paradox, Cambridge University Press. pp. 207-228. 2019.
    Take any putative ordinary object which is divisible into a finite number of small units and tolerant to the loss of one of them. We can remove these units one at a time, and since our object definitely doesn’t exist when there are zero units, and since we cannot pinpoint which removal brings about this destruction, the Sorites Puzzle threatens common sense. We can rescue ordinary objects from its grip, but since independently motivated linguistic explanations of vagueness depend on there being …Read more
  •  43
    Persistence Egalitarianism
    Res Philosophica 98 (1): 63-88. 2021.
    Modal Plenitude—the view that, for every empirically adequate modal profile, there is an object whose modal profile it is—is held to be consistent with each of endurantist and perdurantist (three- and four-dimensionalist) views of persistence. Here I show that, because “endurer” and “perdurer” are two substantially different kinds of entity, compossible with each other and consistent with empirical data, Modal Plenitude actually entails a third view about persistence that I call “Persistence Ega…Read more
  •  70
    That any filled location of spacetime contains a persisting thing has been defended based on the ‘argument from vagueness.’ It is often assumed that since the epistemicist account of vagueness blocks the argument from vagueness it facilitates a conservative ontology without gerrymandered objects. It doesn't. The epistemic vagueness of ordinary object predicates such as ‘bicycle’ requires that objects that can be described as almost‐but‐not‐quite‐bicycle exist even though they fall outside the pr…Read more
  •  139
    Three-dimensionalist’s semantic solution to diachronic vagueness
    Philosophical Studies 150 (1): 79-96. 2010.
    A standard response to the problem of diachronic vagueness is ‘the semantic solution’, which demands an abundant ontology. Although it is known that the abundant ontology does not logically preclude endurantism, their combination is rejected because it necessitates massive coincidence between countless objects. In this paper, I establish that the semantic solution is available not only to perdurantists but also to endurantists by showing that there is no problem with such ubiquitous and principl…Read more