•  673
    This paper explores the political campaigning strategies of Lynton Crosby, and argues that they pose a threat to democracy. In doing so, I looks to shed light on Crosby’s tactics, but also to elucidate exactly what is anti-democratic about them. I argue that there are two worrying aspects to this. The first involves Crosby’s lack of respect for voters’ beliefs, interests and values, whereas the second concerns his propensity for avoiding debate.
  •  574
    Moral Education and Transcendental Idealism
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 102 (4): 646-673. 2020.
    In this paper, we draw attention to several important tensions between Kant’s account of moral education and his commitment to transcendental idealism. Our main claim is that, in locating freedom outside of space and time, transcendental idealism makes it difficult for Kant to both provide an explanation of how moral education occurs, but also to confirm that his own account actually works. Having laid out these problems, we then offer a response on Kant’s behalf. We argue that, while it might l…Read more
  •  571
    Dark Advertising and the Democratic Process
    In Kevin Macnish & Jai Galliott (eds.), Big Data and Democracy, Edinburgh University Press. 2020.
    Political advertising is changing. This chapter considers some of the implications of this for the democratic process. I begin with recent reports of online political advertising. From this, two related concerns emerge. The first is that online political advertisements sometimes occur in the dark, and the second is that they can involve sending different messages to different groups. I consider these issues in turn. This involves an extended discussion of the importance of publicity and discussi…Read more
  •  277
    Hegel, Norms and Ontology
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 36 (3): 279-297. 2019.
    This paper lays out two recent accounts of Hegel’s practical philosophy in order to present a challenge. According to Robert Stern and Mark Alznauer, Hegel attempts to ground our ethical practices in ontological norms. I argue that we cannot ground our ethical practices in this way. However, I also contend that Stern’s and Alznauer’s conception of reality as both conceptual and normative can still play a useful role in practical philosophy, namely, to help defuse a sceptical worry about a threat…Read more
  •  225
    Some Hope for Kant's Groundwork III
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. 2021.
    Kant worries that if we are not free, morality will be nothing more than a phantasm for us. In the final section of the Groundwork, he attempts secure our freedom, and with it, morality. Here is a simplified version of his argument: 1. A rational will is a free will 2. A free will stands under the moral law 3. Therefore, a rational will stands under the moral law In this paper, I attempt to defuse two prominent objections to this argument. Commentators often worry that Kant has not managed to es…Read more
  •  222
    How we understand, protect, and discharge our rights and responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society committed to the principle of political equality is intimately connected to the standards and behaviour of our media in general, and our news media in particular. However, the media does not just stand between the citizenry and their leaders, or indeed between citizens and each other. The media is often the site where individuals attempt to realise some of the most fundamental democratic…Read more
  •  209
    Recent work on freedom in Kant
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (6): 1177-1189. 2021.
    Freedom lies at the heart of Kant’s philosophy. Three recent edited collections explore this key idea in different ways, alongside other related concep...
  •  191
    Timeless Freedom in Kant: Transcendental Freedom and Things-in-Themselves
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 39 (3): 275-292. 2022.
    This paper draws attention to two problems with Kant's claim that transcendental freedom is timeless. The problems are that this causes conceptual difficulties and fails to vindicate important parts of our moral practices. I then put forward three ways in which we can respond to these charges on Kant's behalf. The first is to defend Kant's claim that transcendental freedom occurs outside of time. The second is to reject this claim, but try to maintain transcendental idealism. And the third is to…Read more
  •  177
    In this chapter, we compare Kant and James’ accounts of freedom. Despite both thinkers’ rejecting compatibilism for the sake of practical reason, there are two striking differences in their stances. The first concerns whether or not freedom requires the possibility of an open future. James holds that morality hinges on the real possibility that the future can be affected by our actions. Kant, on the other hand, seems to maintain that we can still be free in the crucial sense, even if none of our…Read more
  •  172
    Why we go wrong: beyond Kant’s dichotomy between duty and self-love
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Kant holds that whenever we fail to act from duty, we are driven by self-love. In this paper, we argue that there are a variety of different ways in which people go wrong, and we show why it is unsatisfying to reduce all of these to self-love. In doing so, we present Kant with five cases of wrongdoing that are difficult to account for in terms of self-love. We end by suggesting a possible fix for Kant, arguing that he should either accept a pluralistic account of self-love, or move beyond the du…Read more
  •  143
    Kant and the Problem of Recognition: Freedom, Transcendental Idealism, and the Third-Person
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2): 164-182. 2016.
    Kant wants to show that freedom is possible in the face of natural necessity. Transcendental idealism is his solution, which locates freedom outside of nature. I accept that this makes freedom possible, but object that it precludes the recognition of other rational agents. In making this case, I trace some of the history of Kant’s thoughts on freedom. In several of his earlier works, he argues that we are aware of our own activity. He later abandons this approach, as he worries that any awarenes…Read more
  •  83
    Taking love seriously: McTaggart, absolute reality and chemistry
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (4): 719-737. 2018.
    McTaggart takes love seriously. He rejects rival accounts that look to reduce love to pleasure, moral approbation or a fitting response to someone’s qualities. In addition, he thinks that love reveals something about the structure of the universe, and that in absolute reality, we could all love each other. In this paper, I follow McTaggart in his rejection of rival accounts of love, but distance myself from his own account of love in absolute reality. I argue that in claiming that we could all l…Read more
  •  83
    Practical grounds for belief: Kant and James on religion
    European Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 1269-1282. 2018.
    Both Kant and James claim to limit the role of knowledge in order to make room for faith. In this paper, we argue that despite some similarities, their attempts to do this come apart. Our main claim is that, although both Kant and James justify our adopting religious beliefs on practical grounds, James believes that we can—and should—subsequently assess such beliefs on the basis of evidence. We offer our own account of this evidence and discuss what this difference means for their accounts of re…Read more
  •  80
    Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (3): 616-619. 2013.
    No abstract
  •  79
    Kant on Mind, Action, & Ethics (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (2): 382-384. 2016.
  •  75
    Kant and Degrees of Responsibility
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 36 (1): 137-154. 2018.
    Kant views every human action as either entirely determined by natural necessity or entirely free. In viewing human action this way, it is unclear how he can account for degrees of responsibility. In this article, I consider three recent attempts to accommodate degrees of responsibility within Kant's framework, but argue that none of them are satisfying. In the end, I claim that transcendental idealism constrains Kant such that he cannot provide an adequate account of degrees of responsibility.
  •  72
    Kant, Rational Psychology and Practical Reason
    Kant Yearbook 6 (1). 2014.
    In his pre-critical lectures on rational psychology, Kant employs an argument from the I to the transcendental freedom of the soul. In the (A-edition of the) first Critique, he distances himself from rational psychology, and instead offers four paralogisms of this doctrine, insisting that ‘I think’ no longer licenses any inferences about a soul. Kant also comes alive to the possibility that we could be thinking mechanisms – rational beings, but not agents. These developments rob him of his pre-c…Read more
  •  68
    Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks alongside Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as one of the most profound and influential works in moral philosophy ever written.
  •  64
    This volume features original essays on the philosophy of love. The essays are organized thematically around the past, present, and future of philosophical thinking about love. In section I, the contributors explore what we can learn from the history of philosophical thinking about love. The chapters cover Ancient Greek thinkers, namely Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kierkegaard's critique of preferential love and Erich Fromm's mystic interpretation of sexual relations. Section II covers curren…Read more
  •  60
    Irrational Love: Taking Romeo and Juliet Seriously
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 30 (3): 254-275. 2022.
    This paper argues that there are important irrational elements to love. In the philosophical literature, we typically find that love is either thought of as rational or arational and that any irrational elements are thought to be defective, or extraneous to love itself. We argue, on the contrary, that irrationality is in part connected to what we find valuable about love. We focus on 3 basic elements of love: 1) Whom you love 2) How much you love them 3) How much of a role love plays in your lif…Read more
  •  50
    In this paper, we do two things: first, we offer a metaphysical account of what it is to be an individual person through Hegel’s understanding of the concrete universal; and second, we show how this account of an individual can help in thinking about love. The aim is to show that Hegel’s distinctive account of individuality and universality can do justice to two intuitions about love which appear to be in tension: on the one hand, that love can involve a response to properties that an individual…Read more
  •  38
    Freedom after Kant situates Kant's concept of freedom in relation to leading philosophers of the period to trace a detailed history of philosophical thinking on freedom from the 18th to the 20th century. Beginning with German Idealism, the volume presents Kant's writings on freedom and their reception by contemporaries, successors, followers and critics. From exchanges of philosophical ideas on freedom between Kant and his contemporaries, Reinhold and Fichte, through to Kant's ideas on rational …Read more
  •  22
    Stephen Engstrom has recently offered an excellent account of morality as practical cognition. He emphasizes the formal conditions of practical knowledge, which he finds in Kant. Engstrom also aligns his account with constructivism, claiming that value is constructed through these formal conditions, chiefly universalisability. In this paper, I employ a variant of Hegel’s empty-formalism objection to challenge the moral significance of the mere form of practical knowledge. I hope to show that Eng…Read more
  •  13
    Transcendental Freedom and its Discontents
    Con-Textos Kantianos 8 319-322. 2018.
    This introduction briefly lays out the basics of Kant’s concept, transcendental freedom, and some of its discontents. It also provides an overview of the dossier itself, introducing Katerina Deligiorgi’s discussion of ought-implies-can, Patrick Frierson’s account of degrees of responsibility, and Jeanine Grenberg’s treatment of the third-person.
  •  11
    The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics is an outstanding survey and assessment of this vitally important field. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, media and communication studies, politics and law, as well as practicing media professionals and journalists.
  •  8
    We must Act under the Idea of Freedom
    In Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 1125-1132. 2018.