•  535
    The shortest way: Kant’s rewriting of the transcendental deduction
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (5): 517-545. 2022.
    This work examines Kant’s remarkable decision to rewrite the core argument of the first Critique, the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. I identify a two-part structure common to both versions: first establishing an essential role for the categories in unifying sensible intuitions; and then addressing a worry about how the connection between our faculties asserted in the first part is possible. I employ this structure to show how Kant rewrote the argument, focusing on Kant’s response to…Read more
  •  615
    Justice at the Margins: The Social Contract and the Challenge of Marginal Cases
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (1): 51-67. 2017.
    Attempts to justify the special moral status of human beings over other animals face a well-known objection: the challenge of marginal cases. If we attempt to ground this special status in the unique rationality of humans, then it becomes difficult to see why nonrational humans should be treated any differently than other, nonhuman animals. We respond to this challenge by turning to the social contract tradition. In particular, we identify an important role for the concept of recognition in atte…Read more
  •  1675
    Departed Souls? Tripartition at the Close of Plato’s Republic
    History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 20 (1): 139-157. 2017.
    Plato’s tripartite soul plays a central role in his account of justice in the Republic. It thus comes as a surprise to find him apparently abandoning this model at the end of the work, when he suggests that the soul, as immortal, must be simple. I propose a way of reconciling these claims, appealing to neglected features of the city-soul analogy and the argument for the soul’s division. The original true soul, I argue, is partitioned, but in a finer manner than how we encounter it in our everyda…Read more
  •  1257
    Kant's Subjective Deduction
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (3): 433-460. 2010.
    In the transcendental deduction, the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seeks to secure the objective validity of our basic categories of thought. He distinguishes objective and subjective sides of this argument. The latter side, the subjective deduction, is normally understood as an investigation of our cognitive faculties. It is identified with Kant’s account of a threefold synthesis involved in our cognition of objects of experience, and it is said to precede and ground Kan…Read more
  •  735
    A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (3): 215-237. 2012.
    Abstract Both parties in the active philosophical debate concerning the conceptual character of perception trace their roots back to Kant's account of sensible intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason. This striking fact can be attributed to Kant's tendency both to assert and to deny the involvement of our conceptual capacities in sensible intuition. He appears to waver between these two positions in different passages, and can thus seem thoroughly confused on this issue. But this is not, in fac…Read more