• Introduction
    In Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2020.
  •  17
    School in the time of Covid
    Monash Bioethics Review 40 (1): 120-144. 2022.
    This article argues that extended school closures during the Covid-19 pandemic were a moral catastrophe. It focuses on closures in the United States of America and discusses their effect on the pandemic, their harmful effects on children, and other morally relevant factors. It concludes by discussing how these closures came to pass and suggests that the root cause was structural, not individual: the relevant decision-makers were working in an institutional setting that stacked the deck heavily i…Read more
  •  57
    _Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science_ asks twelve philosophers to debate six questions that are driving contemporary work in this area of philosophy. But each question also leads readers back to more general issues and shows how these general issues play out in contemporary debates. The result is a book that’s perfect for the advanced student, building up her knowledge of the foundations of the field while also engaging with its cutting-edge questions. Preliminary descriptions of each…Read more
  •  184
    XV—Normative Non-Naturalism and the Problem of Authority
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (3): 297-319. 2017.
  •  1255
    The Possibility of Physicalism
    Journal of Philosophy 111 (9-10): 557-592. 2014.
    It has been suggested that many philosophical theses—physicalism, normative naturalism, phenomenalism, and so on—should be understood in terms of ground. Against this, Ted Sider (2011) has argued that ground is ill-suited for this purpose. Here I develop Sider’s objection and offer a response. In doing so I develop a view about the role of ground in philosophy, and about the content of these distinctively philosophical theses.
  •  582
    Realism and the Absence of Value
    Philosophical Review 127 (3): 279-322. 2018.
    Much recent metaphysics is built around notions such as naturalness, fundamentality, grounding, dependence, essence, and others besides. In this article I raise a problem for this kind of metaphysics, the “problem of missing value.” I survey a number of possible solutions to the problem and find them all wanting. This suggests a return to a kind of Goodmanian view that the world is a structureless mess onto which we project our own categorizations, not something with categories already built in.
  •  192
    The bare necessities
    Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 115-160. 2011.
  •  204
    Substantivalism vs Relationalism About Space in Classical Physics
    Philosophy Compass 10 (9): 601-624. 2015.
    Substantivalism is the view that space exists in addition to any material bodies situated within it. Relationalism is the opposing view that there is no such thing as space; there are just material bodies, spatially related to one another. This paper assesses this issue in the context of classical physics. It starts by describing the bucket argument for substantivalism. It then turns to anti-substantivalist arguments, including Leibniz's classic arguments and their contemporary reincarnation und…Read more
  •  234
    Symmetry as an Epistemic Notion
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (3): 837-878. 2016.
    Symmetries in physics are a guide to reality. That much is well known. But what is less well known is why symmetry is a guide to reality. What justifies inferences that draw conclusions about reality from premises about symmetries? I argue that answering this question reveals that symmetry is an epistemic notion twice over. First, these inferences must proceed via epistemic lemmas: premises about symmetries in the first instance justify epistemic lemmas about our powers of detection, and only fr…Read more
  •  678
    Individuals: an essay in revisionary metaphysics
    Philosophical Studies 145 (1): 35-67. 2009.
    We naturally think of the material world as being populated by a large number of individuals . These are things, such as my laptop and the particles that compose it, that we describe as being propertied and related in various ways when we describe the material world around us. In this paper I argue that, fundamentally speaking at least, there are no such things as material individuals. I then propose and defend an individual-less view of the material world I call “generalism”.
  •  378
    On the Plurality of Grounds
    Philosophers' Imprint 14. 2014.
    This paper argues that ground is irreducibly plural: a group of facts can be grounded together, as a collective, even though no member of the group has a ground on its own. This kind of plural grounding is applied to the metaphysics of individuals and quantities, yielding a “structuralist” view in each case. Some more general implications of plural grounding are also discussed
  •  303
    Constitutive Explanation
    Philosophical Issues 27 (1): 74-97. 2017.
  •  220
    Privilege in the Construction Industry
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2): 489-496. 2019.
  •  572
    Metaphysical Rationalism
    Noûs 50 (2): 379-418. 2016.
    The Principle of Sufficient Reason states that everything has an explanation. But different notions of explanation yield different versions of this principle. Here a version is formulated in terms of the notion of a “grounding” explanation. Its consequences are then explored, with particular emphasis on the fact that it implies necessitarianism, the view that every truth is necessarily true. Finally, the principle is defended from a number of objections, including objections to necessitarianism.…Read more
  •  179
    Inexpressible Ignorance
    Philosophical Review 124 (4): 441-480. 2015.
    Sometimes, ignorance is inexpressible. Lewis recognized this when he argued, in “Ramseyan Humility,” that we cannot know which property occupies which causal role. This peculiar state of ignorance arises in a number of other domains too, including ignorance about our position in space and the identities of individuals. In these cases, one does not know something, and yet one cannot give voice to one's ignorance in a certain way. But what does the ignorance in these cases consist in? This essay a…Read more
  •  186
    Absolutism vs Comparativism About Quantity
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 8 105-150. 2013.
  •  317
    Essentialism and the Nonidentity Problem
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 (3): 540-570. 2018.