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190Though past commentators have attacked cities as corrupt, dirty places, it is almost too obvious to need stating that a sustainable future depends on them. This is because most people live in cities and because the streamlined use of urban space brings a wide range of efficiencies. Simultaneously, urban living and associated technologies may impact psychology such that people see humans and their cities as outside of nature, which has been shown to reduce concern for the wellbeing of the planet.…Read more
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139Global Indigenous Philosophy: Remembering the “Us.”In The Last of Us and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
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225Bodies Under the Weather: Selective Permeability, Political Affordances and Architectural HostilityIn R. Shusterman & R. Veres (eds.), Somaesthetics and Design Culture. 2023.
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294Anticipating and Enacting Worlds: Moods, Illness and Psychobehavioral AdaptationPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1-25. forthcoming.Predictive processing theorists have claimed PTSD and depression are maladaptive and epistemically distorting because they entail undesirably wide gaps between top-down models and bottom-up information inflows. Without denying this is sometimes so, the “maladaptive” label carries questionable normative assumptions. For instance, trauma survivors facing significant risk of subsequent attacks may overestimate threats to circumvent further trauma, “bringing forth” concretely safer personal spaces, …Read more
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306Selective Permeability, Multiculturalism and Affordances in EducationPhilosophical Psychology. forthcoming.Selective permeability holds that people’s distinct capacities allow them to do different things in a space, making it unequally accessible. Though mainly applied to urban geography so far, we propose selective permeability as an affordance-based approach for understanding diversity in education. This has advantages. First, it avoids dismissing lower achievements as necessarily coming from “within” students, instead locating challenges in the environment. This implies that settings (not just peo…Read more
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134Folk Punk and Global Indigenous PhilosophiesIn Post-Punk and Philosophy, Caress Press. forthcoming.
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258Folk Punk and Global Indigenous PhilosophiesIn The Witcher and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
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Echoes of Past and PresentIn Randall E. Auxier & Megan A. Volpert (eds.), Tom Petty and Philosophy: We Need to Know, Open Court Publishing. 2019.
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477Conceptual and moral ambiguities of deepfakes: a decidedly old turnSynthese 202 (1): 1-18. 2023.Everyday (mis)uses of deepfakes define prevailing conceptualizations of what they are and the moral stakes in their deployment. But one complication in understanding deepfakes is that they are not photographic yet nonetheless manipulate lens-based recordings with the intent of mimicking photographs. The harmfulness of deepfakes, moreover, significantly depends on their potential to be mistaken for photographs and on the belief that photographs capture actual events, a tenet known as the transpar…Read more
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8Psychological Expanses of DuneIn Kevin S. Decker (ed.), Dune and Philosophy, Wiley. 2022-10-17.Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but above all, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Many of these ideas are repeated in mainstream American and European philosophical traditions like pragmatism and existential phenomenology. Exploring the Dune universe, can find everything from land based concepts of personal identity, to the idea of sharpening the…Read more
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339Faces and situational AgencyTopoi 41 (4): 659-670. 2022.Though there are many challenges to Ekman’s thesis that there are basic emotions with universal corresponding facial expressions, our main criticism revolves around the extent to which grounding situations alter how people read faces. To that end, we recruit testifying experimental studies that show identical faces expressing varying emotions when contextualized differently. Rather than dismissing these as illusions, we start with the position—generally favored by embodied thinkers—that situatio…Read more
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494Emotional Environments: Selective Permeability, Political Affordances and Normative SettingsTopoi 41 (5): 917-929. 2022.I begin this article with an increasingly accepted claim: that emotions lend differential weight to states of affairs, helping us conceptually carve the world and make rational decisions. I then develop a more controversial assertion: that environments have non-subjective emotional qualities, which organize behavior and help us make sense of the world. I defend this from ecological and related embodied standpoints that take properties to be interrelational outcomes. I also build on conceptions o…Read more
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180Like philosophy itself, Dune explores everything from politics to art to life to reality, but above all, the novels ponder the mysteries of mind. Voyaging through psychic expanses, Frank Herbert hits upon some of the same insights discovered by indigenous people from the Americas. Many of these ideas are repeated in mainstream American and European philosophical traditions like pragmatism and existential phenomenology. These outlooks share a regard for mind as ecological, which is more or less t…Read more
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1342Africapitalism, Ubuntu, and SustainabilityEnvironmental Ethics 43 (3): 235-259. 2021.Ubuntu originated in small-scale societies in precolonial Africa. It stresses metaphysical and moral interconnectedness of humans, and newer Africapitalist approaches absorb ubuntu ideology, with the aims of promoting community wellbeing and restoring a love of local place that global free trade has eroded. Ecological degradation violates these goals, which ought to translate into care for the nonhuman world, in addition to which some sub-Saharan thought systems promote environmental concern as …Read more
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214Movies as EnvironmentsIn V. Vinogradovs (ed.), Aesthetic Literacy vol I: a book for everyone., Mont Publishing House. 2022.
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293Phenomenology and Ecology: Art, Cities, and Cinema in the PandemicPolish Journal of Aesthetics 61. 2021.COVID-19 infects cities, here grasped as quasi-living functioning systems, and the changes inflicted can poetically open us to certain things. Drawing on ecological psychology, we maintain that this brings people into contact with different realities depending on their overall wellbeing, arguing that the aesthetic experience of cities accordingly varies. We then consider iterations of these ideas in dystopian cinema, which portrays global threats altering human relations with technology, art, an…Read more
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411Pragmatic Faith in Science and Religion: A Response to New AtheismQuadranti – Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia Contemporanea 8 (1-2): 313-337. 2022.It is a cliché to say science and religion are antagonistic. The outlook is often promoted by religious people uneducated in the workings of science, and equally by scientifically-oriented individuals with little experience of religion. This essay challenges presumptions about the irreconcilability of science and religion, focusing on action organizing metaphysical principles infusing both. The aim, however, is not to evaluate proofs for God’s existence, nor defend young earth creationism, nor t…Read more
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