Yale University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2007
Saratoga Springs, New York, United States of America
PhilPapers Editorships
Leibniz: Philosophy of Mind
  •  156
    Leibniz on Memory and Consciousness
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (5): 887-916. 2011.
    In this article, I develop a higher-order interpretation of Leibniz's theory of consciousness according to which memory is constitutive of consciousness. I offer an account of Leibniz's theory of memory on which his theory of consciousness may be based, and I then show that Leibniz could have developed a coherent higher-order account. However, it is not clear whether Leibniz held (or should have held) such an account of consciousness; I sketch an alternative that has at least as many advantages …Read more
  •  124
    The principle of continuity and Leibniz's theory of consciousness
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2). 2009.
    Leibniz viewed the principle of continuity, the principle that all natural changes are produced by degrees, as a useful heuristic for evaluating the truth of a theory. Since the Cartesian laws of motion entailed discontinuities in the natural order, Leibniz could safely reject it as a false theory. The principle of continuity has similar implications for analyses of Leibniz's theory of consciousness. I briefly survey the three main interpretations of Leibniz's theory of consciousness and argue t…Read more
  •  113
    Descartes on Music: Between the Ancients and the Aestheticians
    British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (4): 407-424. 2012.
    In this aricle, I argue that Descartes can be seen as a occupying a distinct middle ground between ancient music theory, which was being revived in the Renaissance, and eighteenth-century aestheticians. Descartes’ approach to music had its roots in humanist thought but, even from the start, it wasn’t simply another humanist theory of music. The views Descartes begins to develop in his early years, in the Compendium musicae (1618), is continuous with the views he articulates near the end of his l…Read more
  •  81
    Throughout his philosophical career at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford, Robert Merrihew Adams's wide-ranging contributions have deeply shaped the structure of debates in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and ethics. Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams provides, for the first time, a collection of original essays by leading philosophers dedicated to exploring many of the facets of Adams's thought, a philosophical outlook that co…Read more
  •  58
    This paper traces Leibniz’s use of his neologism, “transcreation.” Leibniz coins the term in his 1676 discussions of motion, using it to identify a certain type of leap that is essential to motion. But Leibniz quickly dispensed with this theory of motion, arguing instead that “nature never acts by leaps,” and the term “transcreation” fell out of use. However, Leibniz surprisingly revived the term in 1709 in his discussion of the generation of rational beings. By contrasting the way Leibniz uses …Read more
  •  48
    New Essays on Leibniz’s Theodicy (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2014.
    In 1710 G. W. Leibniz published Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. This book, the only one he published in his lifetime, established his reputation more than anything else he wrote. The Theodicy brings together many different strands of Leibniz's own philosophical system, and we get a rare snapshot of how he intended these disparate aspects of his philosophy to come together into a single, overarching account of divine justice in the face of the …Read more
  •  47
    Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (review)
    Philosophical Review 117 (4): 615-617. 2008.
  •  43
    Russell’s Leibnizian Concept of Vagueness
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 28 (3): 289-301. 2011.
    The account of vagueness Bertrand Russell provided in his 1923 paper, entitled simply “Vagueness” (see Russell [1923]1997), has been thought by some to be inconsistent. One main objection, raised by Timothy Williamson (1994), is that Russell’s attempt early in the paper to distinguish vagueness from generality is at odds with the definition of vagueness he presents later in the same paper. It is as if, as Williamson puts it, Russell “backslides” from his previous distinction (1994, 60), resultin…Read more
  •  41
    Leibniz on Perceptual Distinctness, Activity, and Sensation
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (1): 49-77. 2015.
    Leibniz explains both activity and sensation in terms of the relative distinctness of perception. This paper argues that the systematic connection between activity and sensation is illuminated by Leibniz’s use of distinctness in analyzing each. Leibnizian sensation involves two levels of activity: on one level, the relative forcefulness of an expression enables certain expressions to stand out against the perceptual field, but in addition to this there is an activity of the mind that enables sen…Read more
  •  26
    Forgiveness After Charleston: The Ethics of an Unlikely Act
    The Good Society 26 (2-3): 338-353. 2017.
    In the wake of the Dylann Roof church shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, forgiveness became a focus of the discussion. Within 48 hours of the shooting, several family members of the victims made personal offers of forgiveness to Dylann Roof. The flood of editorials and opinion pieces commenting on this offer of forgiveness revealed a deep division in public attitudes toward forgiveness, particularly in the context of racially motivated crimes. In this article, I exp…Read more
  •  25
    Leibniz's Naturalized Philosophy of Mind
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    This book is a systematic reappraisal of Leibniz’s philosophy of mind. The main argument of this book is easy to state: Leibniz offers a fully natural theory of mind. In today’s philosophical climate, in which much effort has been put into discovering a naturalized theory of mind, Leibniz’s efforts to reach a similar goal 300 years earlier will provide a critical stance from which we can assess our own theories. But while the goals might be similar, the content of Leibniz’s theory significantly …Read more
  •  9
    Introduction
    In Samuel Newlands & Larry M. Jorgensen (eds.), Metaphysics and the Good: Themes From the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams, Oxford University Press. 2009.
    Throughout his philosophical career at Michigan, UCLA, Yale, and Oxford, Robert Merrihew Adams's wide-ranging contributions have deeply shaped the structure of debates in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, history of philosophy, and ethics. Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams provides, for the first time, a collection of original essays by leading philosophers dedicated to exploring many of the facets of Adams's thought, a philosophical outlook that co…Read more
  •  6
    Consciousness in Western Philosophy
    In Rocco J. Gennaro (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Consciousness, . pp. 24-37. 2018.
    In the pursuit of a naturalized philosophy of mind, consciousness receives concentrated attention, in part because the phenomena of consciousness seem recalcitrant, difficult to explain in the terms of the natural sciences. But this is not a new phenomenon—efforts to provide a naturalized theory of consciousness originate in Ancient Greek philosophy. This chapter defines the project of naturalism in a way that allows for a common project to be traced through the history of Western Philosophy.