•  80
    Global Indigenous Philosophy: Remembering the “Us.”
    In The Last of Us and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
  •  216
    Anticipating and Enacting Worlds: Moods, Illness and Psychobehavioral Adaptation
    Phenomenology 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
  •  220
    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
  •  68
    Post-Apocalyptic Prognostications
    In The Witcher and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
  •  65
    Folk Punk and Global Indigenous Philosophies
    In Post-Punk and Philosophy, Caress Press. forthcoming.
  •  174
    Folk Punk and Global Indigenous Philosophies
    In The Witcher and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. forthcoming.
  • Echoes of Past and Present
    with Matthew Dixon
    In Randall E. Auxier & Megan A. Volpert (eds.), Tom Petty and Philosophy: We Need to Know, Open Court Publishing. 2019.
  •  360
    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
  •  2
    Psychological Expanses of Dune
    In Kevin S. Decker (ed.), Dune and Philosophy, Wiley. 2022.
    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
  •  162
    Ars Erotica (review)
    Society 60. 2023.
  •  259
    Faces and situational Agency
    Topoi 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
  •  391
    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
  •  180
    Psychological Expanses of Dune: Indigenous Philosophy, Americana, and Existentialism
    In Dune and Philosophy: Mind, Monads and Muad’Dib, . forthcoming.
    Like 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
  •  1131
    Africapitalism, Ubuntu, and Sustainability
    Environmental 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
  •  250
    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
  •  345
    Pragmatic Faith in Science and Religion: A Response to New Atheism
    Quadranti – 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
  •  378
    Enactive Pragmatism and Ecological Psychology
    Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
    A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration:…Read more
  •  484
    Architectural Values, Political Affordances and Selective Permeability
    with Mathew Crippen and Vladan Klement
    Open Philosophy 3 (1). 2020.
    This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the s…Read more
  •  681
    Bazin, Cavell and other prominent theorists have asserted that movies are essentially photographic, with more recent scholars such as Carroll and Gaut protesting. Today CGI stands as a further counter, in addition to past objections such as editing, animation and blue screen. Also central in debates is whether photography is transparent, that is, whether it allows us to see things in other times and places. I maintain photography is transparent, notwithstanding objections citing digital manipula…Read more
  •  515
    Debating Public Policy: Ethics, Politics and Economics of Wildlife Management in Southern Africa
    with John Salevurakis
    In Oguz Kelemen & Gergely Tari (eds.), Bioethics of the “Crazy Ape”, Trivent Publishing. pp. 187-195. 2019.
    Based on field research in Africa, this essay explores three claims: first, that sport hunting places economic value on wildlife and habitats; second, that this motivates conservation practices in the interest of sustaining revenue sources; and, third, that this benefits human populations. If true, then sport hunting may sometimes be justifiable on utilitarian grounds. While not dismissing objections from the likes of Singer and Regan, we suggest their views – if converted into policy in despera…Read more
  •  254
    Bazin, Cavell and other prominent theorists have asserted that movies are essentially photographic, with more recent scholars such as Carroll and Gaut protesting. Today CGI stands as a further counter, in addition to past objections such as editing, animation and blue screen. Also central in debates is whether photog- raphy is transparent, that is, whether it allows us to see things in other times and places. I maintain photography is transparent, notwithstanding objections citing dig- ital mani…Read more
  •  593
    This chapter attends to somaesthetic expressions occurring irrespective of knowledge of the movement, using Mandalay’s Water Festival and Cairo’s Arab Spring as case studies. These celebrations and protests feature bodies creatively gravitating around urban structures and according to emotional, cultural concerns, all of this together defining city spaces for a time. Bodies also become venues for artistic refashioning, for example, through creative conversion of injuries into celebratory badge…Read more
  •  13
    Mind Ecologies: Body, Brain, and World
    with Jay Schulkin
    Columbia University Press. 2020.
    Mind Ecologies: Body, Brain, and World: Book Abstract from Columbian University Press Matthew Crippen and Jay Schulkin Pragmatism, a pluralistic philosophy with kinships to phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and embodied cognitive science, is resurging across disciplines. It has growing relevance to literary studies, the arts, and religious scholarship, along with branches of political theory, not to mention our understanding of science. But philosophies and sciences of mind have lagged behind th…Read more