•  249
    When the NCAA adopted new rules allowing athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness (NIL), few people took more interest than Reggie Bush who famously relinquished the Heisman trophy after being ruled retroactively ineligible for receiving "impermissible benefits." Bush has argued for his reinstatement and the "return" of his Heisman. In this paper, I argue that, while the NCAA never should have required players to be amateurs in the first place, Bush should not be reinstated or have…Read more
  •  31
    Setting the record straight: a defense of vacating wins in response to rules violations
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 48 (2): 169-185. 2021.
    ABSTRACT Sometimes, teams or players violate the rules of their leagues or associations. And sometimes, their leagues or associations respond by striking their wins from the official record. Especially in American college sports governed by the NCAA, this practice of vacating results is unpopular and widely decried. It should not be. Vacating wins can be an appropriate response to rules violations in higher-order competitions in the same way that it can be appropriate to call back a scoring play…Read more
  •  15
    Debates about the role of technology in sports officiating assume that technology would, _ceteris paribus_, improve accuracy over unassisted human officiating. While this is largely true, it also presents a false dilemma: that we can have accurately officiated sports or human officials, but not both. What this alleged dilemma ignores is that the criteria by which we measure accuracy are also up for revision. We _could_ have sports that are so defined as to be easily judged by human officials. A …Read more
  •  1
    Berkeley on Common Sense
    In Samuel Charles Rickless (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Debate surrounds whether Berkeley’s philosophy is a defense of, or merely consistent with, common sense, as well as what Berkeley means by “common sense.” This paper defends a view that synthesizes elements of recent approaches: by “common sense” Berkeley means primarily the (de re) belief that the things immediately perceived are the real things, characteristically held by the vulgar and exemplified by vulgar ways of speech. In holding that it is a natural belief, this view is consistent with r…Read more
  •  12
    ‘All-things-considered,’ ‘Better-than,’ And Sports Rankings
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 43 (2): 215-232. 2016.
    Comparative judgments abound in sports. Fans and pundits bandy about which of two players or teams is bigger, faster, stronger, more talented, less injury prone, more reliable, safer to bet on, riskier to trade for, and so on. Arguably, of most interest are judgments of a coarser type: which of two players or teams is, all-things-considered, just plain better? Conventionally, it is accepted that such comparisons can be appropriately captured and expressed by sports rankings. Rankings play an imp…Read more
  •  17
    Bad call (review)
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 45 (1): 101-104. 2018.
  •  209
    Berkeley's "defense" of "commonsense"
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 49 (3): 315-338. 2011.
    Nearly as famous as his denial of the existence of matter is Berkeley's insistence that his philosophy is somehow a defense of commonsense. This is most often taken to mean that Berkeley thinks of his philosophy as supporting commonsense beliefs. However, the inadequacies of such views have persuaded some to disregard entirely Berkeley's claims about commonsense. Both readings are undesirable. Extant interpretations misunderstand the relationship between Berkeley's philosophy and commonsense. In…Read more
  •  100
    The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (review) (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (4): 642-643. 2008.
    Descartes’s correspondence with Elisabeth is among the most important we have for understanding the philosophical thought of a canonical figure. Elisabeth’s perspicacious queries drew forth Descartes’s very famous elaboration of mind/body union. The correspondence also contains the bulk of Descartes’s important statements on morality—a topic touched on only briefly in his books. It seems likely that this part of the correspondence helped set Descartes on the course that resulted in his last book…Read more
  •  585
    Immaterialism and Common Sense
    In Bertil Belfrage & Richard Brook (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Berkeley, Bloomsbury. pp. 343-354. 2017.
  •  31
    Call ‘Em as they are: What’s Wrong with Blown Calls and What to do about them
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 42 (1): 101-120. 2015.
    Mistaken judgments of fact by sporting officials – blown calls – are ubiquitous in sport and have altered the outcomes of games, championships, and even the record books. I argue that the effect these blown calls have on sports is deplorable, even unjust, and that given both the nature of sport in general and the social and economic importance of sports as they are played today, we ought to use technology to aid officials in making their judgments whenever doing so would prove more effective tha…Read more
  •  720
    A modest defense of manifestationalism
    with Jamin Asay
    Synthese 192 (1): 147-161. 2015.
    As the debate between realists and empiricists in the philosophy of science drags on, one point of consensus has emerged: no one wants to be a manifestationalist. The manifestationalist is a kind of radical empiricist who argues that science provides theories that aim neither at a true picture of the entire world, nor even an empirically adequate picture that captures the world in all its observable respects. For manifestationalists, science aims only at providing theories that are true to the o…Read more
  •  102
    If We Stop Thinking About Berkeley's Problem of Continuity, Will It Still Exist?
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2): 237-260. 2017.
    Berkeley holds that the essence of sensible objects is percipi. So, sensible objects cannot exist unperceived. Naturally, this has invited questions about the existence of sensible objects when unperceived by finite minds. This is sometimes called the Problem of Continuity. It is frequently said that Berkeley solves the problem by invoking God's ever-present perception to ensure that sensible objects maintain a continuous existence. Problems with this line of response have led some to a phenomen…Read more
  •  34
    All-things-considered,’ ‘Better-than,’ And Sports Rankings‘
    ‘All-Things-Considered,’ ‘Better-Than,’ and Sports Rankings 1-18. 2016.
    Comparative judgments abound in sports. Fans and pundits bandy about which of two players or teams is bigger, faster, stronger, more talented, less injury prone, more reliable, safer to bet on, riskier to trade for, and so on. Arguably, of most interest are judgments of a coarser type: which of two players or teams is, all-things-considered, just plain better? Conventionally, it is accepted that such comparisons can be appropriately captured and expressed by sports rankings. Rankings play an imp…Read more