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Memberless social groupsSynthese 201 (2): 1-15. 2023.Many philosophers maintain that an adequate metaphysical theory of social groups (e.g., baseball teams, rock bands, committees, and courts) will be one that is capable of accommodating social groups that may exist despite having no members. In this paper, I examine cases that motivate this position, cases where a social group seems to persist at some time despite having no members at that time. My aim here is twofold. First, I aim to show that we may accept that these motivating cases are indeed…Read more
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Learning from Arguments: An Introduction to PhilosophyThe PhilPapers Foundation. 2022.Learning from Arguments advances accessible versions of key philosophical arguments, in a form that students can emulate in their own writing, and with the primary aim of cultivating an understanding of the dynamics of philosophical argumentation. The book contains ten core chapters, covering the problem of evil, Pascal’s wager, personal identity, the irrationality of fearing death, free will and determinism, Cartesian skepticism, the problem of induction, the problem of political authority, th…Read more
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Mereological Nihilism and Puzzles about Material ObjectsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (4): 842-868. 2018.Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new puzzles apply just as…Read more
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Debunking argumentsPhilosophy Compass 14 (12). 2019.Debunking arguments—also known as etiological arguments, genealogical arguments, access problems, isolation objec- tions, and reliability challenges—arise in philosophical debates about a diverse range of topics, including causation, chance, color, consciousness, epistemic reasons, free will, grounding, laws of nature, logic, mathematics, modality, morality, natural kinds, ordinary objects, religion, and time. What unifies the arguments is the transition from a premise about what does or doesn't…Read more
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Are there genuine mathematical explanations of physical phenomena?Mind 114 (454): 223-238. 2005.Many explanations in science make use of mathematics. But are there cases where the mathematical component of a scientific explanation is explanatory in its own right? This issue of mathematical explanations in science has been for the most part neglected. I argue that there are genuine mathematical explanations in science, and present in some detail an example of such an explanation, taken from evolutionary biology, involving periodical cicadas. I also indicate how the answer to my title questi…Read more
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Essence and natural kinds: When science meets preschooler intuitionOxford Studies in Epistemology 4 108-66. 2013.The present paper focuses on essentialism about natural kinds as a case study in order to illustrate this more general point. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam famously argued that natural kinds have essences, which are discovered by science, and which determine the extensions of our natural kind terms and concepts. This line of thought has been enormously influential in philosophy, and is often taken to have been established beyond doubt. The argument for the conclusion, however, makes critical use…Read more
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The existence entailments of definite descriptionsLinguistics and Philosophy 33 (1): 1-10. 2010.
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Ordinary objectsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.
University of California, Santa Barbara
PhD, 2022
APA Western Division
Arlington, VA, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |