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20The Irreducibility of Chemistry to Everettian Quantum MechanicsFoundations of Chemistry 27. 2025.The question of whether chemical structure is reducible to Everettian Quantum Mechanics (EQM) should be of interest to philosophers of chemistry and philosophers of physics alike. Among the three realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, EQM resolves the measurement problem by claiming that measurements (now interpreted as instances of decoherence) have indeterminate outcomes absolutely speaking, but determinate outcomes relative to emergent worlds (Maudlin, 1995). Philosophers who wish to b…Read more
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1269Aesthetic Truth Through the AgesProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 94 139-151. 2020.Classical authors were generally artistic realists. The predominant aesthetic theory was mimesis, which saw the truth of art as its successful representation of reality. High modernists rejected this aesthetic theory as lifeless, seeing the truth of art as its subjective expression. This impasse has serious consequences for both the Church and the public square. Moving forward requires both, first, an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the high modernist critique of classical mimeti…Read more
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101580,000 Hours for the Common GoodProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 95 117-139. 2021.Effective Altruism is a rapidly growing and influential contemporary philosophical movement committed to updating utilitarianism in both theory and practice. The movement focuses on identifying urgent but neglected causes and inspiring supererogatory giving to meet the need. It also tries to build a broader coalition by adopting a more ecumenical approach to ethics which recognizes a wide range of values and moral constraints. These interesting developments distinguish Effective Altruism from th…Read more
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4"Clerical" and "Lay" as Analogous TermsNova et Vetera 22 (4): 1199-1214. 2024.The Code of Canon Law defines the laity simply as the non-ordained. While helpfully direct and often useful, this definition gives no hint as to why non-ordained religious may not always count among the laity, nor of how the function and mission of the laity could be defined in positive terms. I propose to resolve these difficulties by understanding the Biblical foundations of “clerical” and “lay” (κλῆρος and λαός) as essentially related by analogy of proper proportionality, with clerics as the …Read more
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184Amie Thomasson’s Easy Ontology program is influential and attractive, but faces criticism for being too easy in a way that undercuts its realism by failing to recognize objects which don’t fall under known kinds and generating spurious and duplicative objects by mere conceptual engineering. We suggest that restricting the Easy Ontology program to artifacts avoids these difficulties. We also propose an Easy Ontology-inspired analysis of artifact which cuts through the major extant objections to e…Read more
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24Levels-of-reality talk is common among practicing scientists and philosophers of science, yet such talk of levels has been criticized by Jaegwon Kim, Amie Thomasson, and Angela Potochnik, which I analyze into three objections of increasing strength. The first requires abandoning only some of the wilder claims about levels, while the second prunes off many biological uses, and the third poses serious challenges even for metaphysicians. Metaphysicians who wish to save realism about levels must be …Read more
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77The popular metaphysical view that concrete objects are grounded in their ultimate parts is often motivated by appeals to realist interpretations of contemporary physics. This paper argues that an examination of mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics undercuts such atomist claims. First, mereological atomism is only plausible in conjunction with Bohmian mechanics. Second, on either an endurantist or perdurantist theory of time, atomism exacerbates Bohmianism’s existing tensions with ser…Read more
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487Best Practices for Oral ExamsAmerican Association of Philosophy Teachers Studies in Pedagogy 8 133-135. 2023.While recently hyped as a defense against AI plagiarism, oral exams have fallen out of favor in American philosophy departments. They are often perceived as part of an antiquated system where the day-to-day coursework is sharply distinguished from a 100% weighted final exam, with a more oppositional than collaborative student-professor relationship. Such examinations do not lend themselves to blind grading, and also reinforce the existing privilege of students who are confident, fast-spoken, an…Read more
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92Chemical reduction and quantum interpretation: A case for thomistic emergenceFoundations of Chemistry 25 (3): 405-417. 2023.The debate between ontological reductionists and emergentists in chemistry has revolved around quantum mechanics. What Franklin and Seifert (BJPS 2020) add to the long-running dispute is an attention to the measurement problem. They contend that all three realist interpretations of the quantum formalism capable of resolving the measurement problem also obviate any need for chemical emergence. I push their argument further, arguing that the realist interpretations of quantum mechanics actually su…Read more
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400Aquinas’s Science of Sacra Doctrina as a Platonic TechnêRevista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (1-2): 633-656. 2023.Aquinas’s characterization of sacra doctrina has received sustained engagement addressing its relation to contemporary conceptions of theology and Aristotelian conceptions of science. More recently, attention has been paid to Aquinas’s neo-Platonist influences, and the way they lead him to subvert purely Aristotelian categories. I therefore combine these themes by introducing the first study of whether sacra doctrina counts as a technê in Plato’s sense. After examining how Platonic technê relate…Read more
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763Holding Large Language Models to AccountIn Berndt Müller (ed.), Proceedings of the AISB Convention, Society For the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. pp. 7-14. 2023.If Large Language Models can make real scientific contributions, then they can genuinely use language, be systematically wrong, and be held responsible for their errors. AI models which can make scientific contributions thereby meet the criteria for scientific authorship.
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428The use of lexical signs like ‘knowledge’ has consequences. Not only do they have direct psychological resonances, but people ascribe beliefs and act based on their semantics. This paper proposes that such consequences are up for negotiation, and introduces a formal framework from financial theory to suggest constraints on those negotiations and implications of those constraints. The upshot is that changing language will be easier sometimes than others, and philosophers’ projects of linguistic c…Read more
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133Does Artificial Intelligence Use Private Language?In Ines Skelac & Ante Belić (eds.), What Cannot Be Shown Cannot Be Said: Proceedings of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, Zagreb, Croatia, 2021, Lit Verlag. pp. 113-124. 2023.Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument holds that language requires rule-following, rule following requires the possibility of error, error is precluded in pure introspection, and inner mental life is known only by pure introspection, thus language cannot exist entirely within inner mental life. Fodor defends his Language of Thought program against the Private Language Argument with a dilemma: either privacy is so narrow that internal mental life can be known outside of introspection, or so br…Read more
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684“The Diagram is More Important Than is Ordinarily Believed”: A Picture of Lonergan’s Cognitional StructureThe Lonergan Review 12 51-78. 2021.In his article “Insight: Genesis and Ongoing Context,” Fred Crowe calls out Lonergan’s line “the diagram is more important than…is ordinarily believed” as the “philosophical understatement of the century.” Sixteen pages later he identifies elaborating an invariant cognitional theory to underlie generalized emergent probability and thus “the immanent order of the universe of proportionate being,” as “our challenge,” “but given the difficulty” he does not “see any prospect for an immediate answ…Read more
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150Thomistic Foundations for Moderate Realism about Mathematical ObjectsIn Serge-Thomas Bonino & Luca F. Tuninetti (eds.), Vetera Novis Augere: Le risorse della tradizione tomista nel contesto attuale II, Urbaniana University Press. forthcoming.Contemporary philosophers of mathematics are deadlocked between two alternative ontologies for numbers: Platonism and nominalism. According to contemporary mathematical Platonism, numbers are real abstract objects, i.e. particulars which are nonetheless “wholly nonphysical, nonmental, nonspatial, nontemporal, and noncausal.” While this view does justice to intuitions about numbers and mathematical semantics, it leaves unclear how we could ever learn anything by mathematical inquiry. Mathematica…Read more
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181The Mereology of EmergenceDissertation, The University of St Andrews. 2019.The debate about the ontological innocence of mereology has generally been framed as a debate about the plausibility of Universal Fusion. Ontologically loaded fusions must be more than the sum of their parts, and this seems to violate parsimony if fusion is universal. Less attention has been paid to the question of what sort of emergence mereological fusions must exhibit if they are irreducible to their parts. The philosophy of science literature provides several models of such strong emergence.…Read more
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81Perennial Symmetry Arguments: Aristotle’s Heavenly Cosmology and Noether’s First TheoremProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 93 131-149. 2019.Attempts to find perennial elements in Aristotle’s cosmology are doomed to failure because his distinction of sub- and supra-lunary realms no longer holds. More fruitful approaches to the contemporary importance of Aristotelian cosmology must focus on parities of reasoning rather than content. This paper highlights the striking parallels between Aristotle’s use of symmetry arguments in cosmology and instances of Noether’s First Theorem in contemporary physics. Both observe simple motion, find sy…Read more
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73Part is not a univocal term. Uses of parthood and composition that do not obey any supplementation principle have a long philosophical tradition and strong support from contemporary physics. We call such uses potential parts. This paper first shows why potential parts are important and incompatible with supplementation, then provides a formal mereology for such parts inspired by the path-integral approach to quantum electrodynamics.
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85The Unity of the Concept of Matter in AristotleDissertation, The Catholic University of America. 2018.The difficulties often attributed to prime matter hold for all hylomorphic accounts of substantial change. If the substratum of substantial change actually persists through the change, then such change is merely another kind of accidental change. If the substratum does not persist, then substantial change is merely creation ex nihilo. Either way matter is an empty concept, explaining nothing. This conclusion follows from Aristotle’s homoeomerity principle, and attempts to evade this conclusi…Read more
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608Quantum Considerations in the Metaphysics of LevelsDissertation, Université de Genève. 2025.Amie Thomasson challenges advocates of layered conceptions of reality to explain “how layers are distinguished” and “what holds them together” by “examining the world” (2014). One strategy for answering such questions is mereological, treating inter-layer relations as parthood relations, where layers exist whenever composition does, and the number of layers will be equivalent to the number of answers to Peter Van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question, while answers to his General Composition Qu…Read more
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76Nonrational Belief Paradoxes as Byzantine FailuresLogos and Episteme 13 (4): 343-358. 2022.David Christensen and others argue that Dutch Strategies are more like peer disagreements than Dutch Books, and should not count against agents‘ conformity to ideal rationality. I review these arguments, then show that Dutch Books, Dutch Strategies, and peer disagreements are only possible in the case of what computer scientists call Byzantine Failures—uncorrected Byzantine Faults which update arbitrary values. Yet such Byzantine Failures make agents equally vulnerable to all three kinds of epis…Read more
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Department of PhilosophyDoctoral student
APA Eastern Division
Areas of Specialization
Quantum Mechanics |
Aristotle |
Material Objects |
Mereology |
Interlevel Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
8 more