•  69
    Critical Contextual Aestheticism
    Debates in Aesthetics. forthcoming.
    Inspired by Helen Longino’s ‘critical contextual empiricism’, in this paper I argue that art arises from social epistemic procedures that encompass both aesthetic functions and institutional practices. Within these procedures, aesthetic functions are developed, validated, and enforced through institutional practices, rather than being solely tied to the artistic outcomes of those practices. I call this approach ‘critical contextual aestheticism’.
  •  9
    The question of what and how artworks mean things is conventionally satisfied by appealing to literature from either philosophy of art or philosophy of language. This book offers an alternative by positioning art as a type of meaning-making tool whose function can only be understood through the application of the philosophy of technology.
  •  19
    Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country
    with Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, and Adriana Mattos
    In Simon Cushing (ed.), New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 293-314. 2021.
    Love for a country has come to be linked with two terms: patriotism and nationalism. The conceptual distinction between these two ideas has been a matter of controversy. In this chapter we propose that one way of thinking about and distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism is via the very concept of love. We make the claim that what distinguishes patriotism and nationalism is not the quality of love but the type of love invoked. We argue that love in patriotism is similar to familial lov…Read more
  •  9
    Provoking thought: A predictive processing account of critical thinking and the effects of education
    with Christopher J. May and Merethe Blandhol
    Educational Philosophy and Theory 54 (14): 2458-2468. 2022.
    In this paper, we propose that an increasingly regarded theoretical framework in neuroscience—the predictive processing framework—can help to advance an understanding of the foundations of critical thinking as well as provide a mechanistic hypothesis for how education may increase a learner’s subsequent use of critical thinking outside of an educational context. We begin by identifying a lacuna in the understanding of critical thinking: a causal account of the internal triggers to think critical…Read more
  •  271
    A Holy Dullness: Tarkovsky, Suture, and the Numinous
    In Venetia Laura Delano Robertson & Carole M. Cusack (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Religion, Film and Television, Brill. forthcoming.
    In this chapter, I argue that the films of Andrei Tarkovsky are particularly suitable for inducing feelings of the numinous. This suitability is a formal rather than semantic feature of his films, and is tied indelibly to what film scholars call ‘suture’. I with a summary of what film theorists mean by ‘suture’, before providing a principled defence of the Merleau-Pontian suture theory outlined by George Butte. Second, I will demonstrate that, in spite of the strength of Butte’s formulation, the…Read more
  •  1
    Authenticity and the ‘Authentic City’
    In Michael Nagenborg, Taylor Stone, Margoth González Woge & Pieter E. Vermaas (eds.), Technology and the City: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Technologies, Springer Verlag. pp. 253-270. 2021.
    In this paper, I argue that the benefits that smart cities purport to provide cohere poorly with a number of our shared phenomenological intuitions about the relationships between authentic experience and technologised society. While many of these intuitions are, strictly speaking, pseudo-problems, they deserve our attention. These issues will only grow more pressing as our ‘dumb cities’, already so opaque to experience, give way to hyper-technologised ‘smart cities’. However, it is possible to …Read more
  •  12
    Effing the Ineffable
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 24 (3): 282-305. 2020.
    Motivating this article is an interest in how postphenomenological technical relations participate in aesthetic experiences. Introducing aesthetic experience into our analyses of technical relations allows us to better tease apart the distinction between our relationship with the artefact, and how we experience that relationship. However, the sublime poses a unique set of complications for postphenomenologists. Thanks to the overwhelming qualities of the sublime, it is unclear where sublimity fi…Read more
  •  7
    In this paper, I attempt to question the very idea of "enhancement" itself. Given the tool-using nature of human beings, does the idea of enhancement have any critical traction, when it could be argued that all tool use is an attempt to enhance experience? This has grave ramifications for the public ethics that surrounds any discussion about the application of transhuman technologies. If, as I argue, there is nothing special about "enhancement" - indeed, if it is that very thing that makes us hu…Read more
  •  825
    This dissertation examines the relationship that exists between two distinct and seemingly incompatible bodies of scholarship within the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. The first, as argued by postmodern pragmatist Barry Allen, posits that our tools and what we make with them are epistemically important; disputing the idea that knowledge is strictly sentential or propositional, he claims instead that knowledge is the product of a performance that is both superlative and artefactu…Read more
  •  8
    A shared goal amongst most educators, we argue, is to supplant students’ raw or “naive” intuitions with more refined intuitions about a particular domain. Educators want students, and people more generally, to recognize when ideas, frameworks, and processes don’t “look right”. When we know that something does not look right, sound right, or feel right, we investigate further. We seek to fill in the gaps between our knowledge and we attempt to learn new approaches for solving problems. Lifelong l…Read more
  •  25
    Bloody-Minded Metaphysics: Barry Allen vs. the World
    Contemporary Pragmatism 13 (2): 129-142. 2016.
    Barry Allen, in his 2005 Knowledge and Civilization and his 2008 Artifice and Design, argues in favor of an epistemic system that is both praxical and performative; knowledge, rather than being expressed propositionally, is a kind of performance that is expressed in artifacts of all kinds, of which propositions are but an example. However, although he makes a compelling case, it is rather less clear the extent to which we are able to make judgments about the world beneath the artifacts. That is …Read more