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After Nature: On Bodies, Consciousness, and CausalityJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (5-6): 229-250. 2012.Within John Dewey's pragmatic naturalism, consciousness, meaning, and value were conceptualized as ontologically real phenomena. During the century that has passed since Dewey's time, naturalism has come to be dominated by physicalist and realist perspectives within which the reality of consciousness, meaning, and value are problematic. Given this historical tension in naturalism, the present paper does the following: describes why consciousness, causality, and the body were all at home in Dewey…Read more
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13After Nature: On Bodies, Consciousness, and CausalityJournal of Consciousness Studies 19 (5-6): 5-6. 2012.
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80Thick Ethical Concepts in the Philosophy and Literature of Iris MurdochSouthern Journal of Philosophy 51 (3): 402-417. 2013.Although thick ethical concepts have been neglected in Murdochian scholarship, this article argues that they were central to the thought of Iris Murdoch. In the first section, the article provides a sustained account of thick ethical concepts in Murdoch's philosophy, demonstrating how these concepts align with and illuminate familiar aspects of her philosophical essays. The first section also explores the ways in which Murdoch's alternative account of moral concepts was at the heart of her overa…Read more
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The Ghost of Prometheus: A Critical Response to Nicholas C. Carr’s The ShallowsSouthwest Philosophy Review 28 (1): 93-101. 2012.
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69On the transcendental structure of Iris Murdoch's philosophical methodEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 394-410. 2022.Recent scholarship has focused on the provocative suggestion that there is a deep unity linking the philosophical projects of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. In addition to providing scholars with the opportunity to consider what these four shared, the unanimity story also offers an occasion to reflect on what is distinctive about each. Whereas Anscombe, Foot, and Midgley each turn to broadly Aristotelian resources for developing an alternative to the dominant …Read more
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200Have Neo-Aristotelians Abandoned Naturalism? On the Distinctively Human Form of Practical ReasonJournal of Value Inquiry 54 (2): 183-201. 2020.
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A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch by Maria Antonaccio (review)The Iris Murdoch Review 1. 2013.
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138Reconsidering Iris Murdoch’s Moral RealismJournal of Value Inquiry 48 (3): 371-385. 2014.Scholars who have attempted to explain Iris Murdoch’s moral realism have done so in widely divergent ways, some characterizing her as a classical moral realist, others as a pragmatic moral realist, and still others as a “reflexive realist.”See, e.g., respectively, Fergus Kerr, “Back to Plato with Iris Murdoch,” in Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1997), 68–88; Sami Pihlstrom, Pragmatic Moral Realism: A Transcendental Defence…Read more
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42Iris Murdoch's genealogy of the modern self : retrieving consciousness beyond the linguistic turnDissertation, Baylor. 2008.In this dissertation I argue that Murdoch’s philosophical-ethical project is best understood as an anti-Enlightenment genealogical narrative. I maintain that her work consistently displays four fundamental features that typify genealogical accounts: 1) liberation from a dominant philosophical picture; 2) restoration of a previous philosophical picture wrongly dismissed; 3) restoration of practices no longer intelligible on the dominant view; and 4) recovery of an alternative grammar at odds with…Read more
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8Joachim of FioreIn George Giacumakis, Fergus Kerr, Frederick Norris & Alvin Schmidt (eds.), Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, Wiley-blackwell. 2012.
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11BoethiusIn George Giacumakis, Fergus Kerr, Frederick Norris & Alvin Schmidt (eds.), Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, Wiley-blackwell. 2012.According to tradition, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (born c.480 in Rome) died as a Christian martyr in Pavia between 524 and 526. He was a philosopher, theologian, and statesman; as a translator and commentator he is often considered the most important intermediary between the ancient Greek intellectual tradition and the Latin Middle Ages. As the “last Roman” and the “first of the Scholastics,” he is best known for the Consolation of Philosophy, a prison text treating the transitory natur…Read more
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28Exemplarist Moral Theory by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (review)Review of Metaphysics 71 (2): 399-401. 2017.
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58The Ghost of Prometheus: A Critical Response to Nicholas C. Carr’s The ShallowsSouthwest Philosophy Review 28 (1): 93-101. 2012.
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76Ethical Naturalism and the Justification of Claims about Human FormDialogue 55 (3): 467-492. 2016.Recent defenders of Philippa Foot, such as Michael Thompson and John Hacker-Wright, have argued that it is a mistake to think that Ft aims to justify a substantive conception of human soundness and defect. instead, she relies on the acceptance of certain groundless moral norms to underwrite her views about what is characteristically human. I maintain that this is a weakness and that the Footian-style proponent of natural normativity needs to provide a story about how we might achieve justified s…Read more
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54The Indispensability of Tradition in the Philosophical Activity of SocratesProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 84 223-237. 2010.In this paper I argue that narratives concerning Periclean Athens have mistakenly imposed modern conceptions of enlightenment onto the Greek world,and have therefore been blinded to crucial aspects of Socrates’s practice of moral reason giving. In contrast to the Kantian conception of enlightenment, which puts forth an image of the ideally enlightened person as an autonomous reasoner, one who refuses to be guided by another and who has the courage to throw off the chains of tradition and “think …Read more
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82Philippa Foot’s So-called Achilles’ HeelAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91 (2): 251-271. 2017.Philippa Foot’s attempt in Natural Goodness to defend the claim that moral goodness is a form of species-specific natural goodness and that immorality is a natural defect has elicited a number of challenges. For instance, Scott Woodcock presents the following dilemma: Foot’s account of natural normativity either yields morally objectionable results, or there exists an appeal to a normative standard not grounded in natural norms. I contend that the Footian Neo-Aristotelian approach possesses the …Read more
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122Natural Normativity and the Authority-of-Nature ChallengeInternational Philosophical Quarterly 59 (1): 23-36. 2019.Proponents of natural normativity maintain that the moral evaluation of human beings shares a certain common conceptual pattern with the evaluation of other living things. The adequacy of this analogy has been challenged, with opponents arguing that because humans are rational, there is a gap between what is natural and what is normative for humans. Rational creatures, the argument goes, are importantly different from non-rational living things in that reason includes the ability to step back fr…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Normativity |
Moral Naturalism |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Moral Normativity |
Moral Naturalism |