•  142
    Only Human (In the Age of Social Media)
    In Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, . forthcoming.
    This chapter argues that for human, technological, and human-technological reasons, disagreement, critique, and counterspeech on social media fall squarely into the province of non-ideal theory. It concludes by suggesting a modest but challenging disposition that can help us when we are torn between opposing oppression and contributing to a flame war.
  •  133
    A Science Like Any Other: A Peircean Philosophy of Sex
    In Cornelis De Waal (ed.), The Oxford handbook of Charles S. Peirce, Oxford University Press. pp. 499-513. 2024.
    This chapter argues that a Peircean philosophy of sex offers a non-reductionist approach to sex as a biological category. The chapter surveys traditional biological accounts of sex categories and several social constructivist accounts of sex. It then provides an overview of Peirce’s scholastic realism and his ethics of inquiry. While Peirce regarded the distinction between the sexes as a rare “polar distinction”, the chapter works to recover the nuanced view of sex that Peirce ought to have adop…Read more
  •  154
    Academic Freedom and the Duty of Care
    In Carl Fox & Joe Saunders (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics, Routledge. pp. 56-68. 2023.
    This chapter offers a plea for the media to reframe its coverage of campus controversies from free expression to academic freedom. These freedoms are entwined, but distinct. Freedom of expression is extended to all persons with no expectation of quality control, apart from legal prohibitions against defamation, threats, etc. By contrast, academic freedom is a cluster of freedoms afforded to scholarly personnel for a particular purpose – namely, the pursuit of universities’ academic mission to se…Read more
  •  12
    How are sex and gender related? Are they the same thing? What exactly is gender? How many genders are there? What is the science on all of this? Is gender a product of nature, nurture, or both? This book introduces readers to fundamental questions about sex and gender categories as they’ve been considered across the centuries and through a wide array of disciplines and perspectives. From the Bible to Darwin, from Enlightenment thinkers to contemporary trans philosophers, _Beyond the Binary_ offe…Read more
  •  6
    Fetal Life, Abortion, and Harm Reduction
    In Hasana Sharp & Chloë Taylor (eds.), Feminist Philosophies of Life, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 239-254. 2016.
  •  19
    Peirce and Spinoza's Surprising Pragmaticism
    Dissertation, University of Western Ontario. 2007.
    This study examines C.S. Peirce's repeated remarks between 1904 and 1909 characterizing Spinoza as a precursor pragmatist.
  •  241
    Meaning and Inquiry in Feminist Pragmatist Narrative
    In Scott F. Aikin & Robert B. Talisse (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Pragmatism, Routledge. pp. 380-386. 2022.
    By tracing its own narrative from the feminist pragmatism of the 1980s-2000s back to the avant-la-lettre feminist pragmatism of the Progressive Era, this chapter explores the use of narrative within feminist pragmatism. It pays particular attention to uses of narrative in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Julia Cooper and Jane Addams to reveal the usefulness of narrative as a feminist pragmatist mode of inquiry and of elucidating meaning. The chapter concludes with a brief suggestion of where femin…Read more
  •  430
    On Silence: Student Refrainment From Speech
    In Emmett Macfarlane (ed.), Dilemmas of Free Expression, University of Toronto Press. pp. 252-268. 2021.
    In this chapter I provide resources for assessing the charge that post-secondary students are self-censoring. The argument is advanced in three broad steps. First, I argue that both a duality at the heart of the concept of self-censorship and the term’s negative lay connotation should incline us to limit the charge of self-censorship to a specific subset of its typical extension. I argue that in general we ought to use the neutral term “refrainment from speech,” reserving the more normatively ch…Read more
  •  379
    The Evolving Social Purpose of Academic Freedom
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 31 (2): 199-222. 2021.
    In the face of the increasing substitution of free speech for academic freedom, I argue for the distinctiveness and irreplaceability of the latter. Academic freedom has evolved alongside universities in order to support the important social purpose universities serve. Having limned this evolution, I compare academic freedom and free speech. This comparison reveals freedom of expression to be an individual freedom, and academic freedom to be a group-differentiated freedom with a social purpose. I…Read more
  •  29
    Harm Reduction: A Research Agenda
    Health Care Analysis 28 (4): 299-301. 2020.
  •  47
    Toward a Philosophy of Harm Reduction
    Health Care Analysis 28 (4): 302-313. 2020.
    In this paper, I offer a prolegomenon to the philosophy of harm reduction. I begin with an overview of the philosophical literature on both harm and harm reduction, and a brief summary of harm reduction scholarship outside of philosophy in order to make the case that philosophers have something to contribute to understanding harm reduction, and moreover that engagement with harm reduction would improve philosophical scholarship. I then proceed to survey and assess the nascent and still modest ph…Read more
  •  48
    Meaning, Inquiry, and the Rule of Reason: A Hookwayesque Colligation
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 51 (4): 401. 2015.
    Taking my lead from Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin's distinction between “meaning pragmatism” and “inquiry pragmatism,” and guided throughout by Christopher Hookway's understanding of Peirce, I revisit some of the best-known locuses of both Peirce's meaning pragmatism and his inquiry pragmatism, and conclude that the distinction dissolves in Peirce. For Peirce, the very mechanism for elucidating a concept's meaning, the pragmatic maxim, requires ongoing inquiry. Moreover, in performing an inquir…Read more
  •  40
    A Harm-Reduction Approach to Abortion
    In Without Apology: Writings on Abortion in Canada, . pp. 317-32. 2016.
    Full text available at the external link below.
  •  66
    Continental Rationalism
    with Julie Walsh and Thomas M. Lennon
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
    The expression “continental rationalism” refers to a set of views more or less shared by a number of philosophers active on the European continent during the latter two thirds of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Rationalism is most often characterized as an epistemological position. On this view, to be a rationalist requires at least one of the following: (1) a privileging of reason and intuition over sensation and experience, (2) regarding all or most ideas as innate…Read more
  •  24
    Diversity is becoming a watchword in philosophy. Increasingly, philosophers are working to diversify their syllabi, their journals, their textbooks, and their conferences. Admirable as this movement is, this approach to diversity can often be rather mechanistic in character – a mere totting-up of the number of women or members of under-represented groups on programmes and in tables of contents. Drawing on my work reconstructing and teaching a very diverse history of philosophy canon, I argue tha…Read more
  •  178
    Firstness, evolution and the absolute in Peirce's Spinoza
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (4). 2008.
    Inspired by Peirce’s repeated claim in the final decade of his life that Spinoza was a pragmati(ci)st, this article examines whether or not Peirce also believed that Spinoza’s metaphysics leaves room for Firstness. He engaged this issue explicitly in his third “Lecture on Pragmatism” (1903), listing Spinoza’s among the metaphysics that include Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Moreover, over a decade earlier, in the context of his exploration of hyperbolic geometry and the evolutionary cosmol…Read more
  •  64
    The Infinite and the Indeterminate in Spinoza
    Dialogue 50 (3): 603-621. 2011.
    ABSTRACT: I argue that when Spinoza describes substance and its attributes as he means that they are utterly indeterminate. That is, his conception of infinitude is not a mathematical one. For Spinoza, anything truly infinite eludes counting s conception is closer to a grammatical one. I conclude by considering a number of arguments against this account of the Spinozan infinite as indeterminate
  •  6
    Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (review)
    Symposium 8 (1): 156-158. 2004.
  •  80
    Heidegger and Galileo’s Slippery Slope
    Dialogue 48 (1): 59-76. 2009.
    ABSTRACT: In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Martin Heidegger characterizes Galileo as an important transitional figure in the struggle to replace the Aristotelian conception of nature with that of Newton. However, Heidegger only attends to Galileo’s modernity and not to those Aristotelian elements still discernible in Galileo’s work. This article fleshes out both aspects in Galileo in light of Heidegger’s discussion. It concludes by arguing that the lacuna in Heidegger’s account of Galileo is the cons…Read more
  •  17
    Thomas Reid's Rigourised Anti-Hypotheticalism
    Journal of Scottish Philosophy 3 (2): 123-138. 2005.
  •  149
    "Merely a veil over the living thought": Mathematics and logic in Peirce's forgotten Spinoza review
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (4): 501-517. 2006.
    This paper considers Peirce's striking remarks about mathematics in a little-known review of Spinoza's Ethics within the larger context of his philosophy of mathematics. It argues that, for Peirce, true mathematical reasoning is always at the vanguard of thought, and resists logical demonstration. Through diagrammatic thought and her pre-theoretical innate faculty of logica utens, the great mathematician is able to see a theorem as true long before the logical apparatus necessary to demonstrate …Read more
  •  37
    A House at War Against Itself: Absolute Versus Pluralistic Idealism in Spinoza, Peirce, James and Royce
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 710-731. 2015.
    In this paper, I elaborate affinities between Peirce, Spinoza and Royce, in order to illuminate the division between Peirce's and James's expressions of idealism. James contrasted Spinoza's and Royce's absolute idealism with his and Peirce's pluralistic idealism. I triangulate among Peirce, Spinoza and Royce to show that, contra James's view, Peirce himself was more at home in the absolutistic camp. In Section 2, I survey Peirce's discussions of Spinoza's pragmatism and of the divide within prag…Read more
  •  41
  •  45
  •  20
    "Merely a veil over the living thought": Mathematics and Logic in Peirce's Forgotten Spinoza Review
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (4): 501-517. 2006.
    This paper considers Peirce's striking remarks about mathematics in a little-known review of Spinoza's Ethics within the larger context of his philosophy of mathematics. It argues that, for Peirce, true mathematical reasoning is always at the vanguard of thought, and resists logical demonstration. Through diagrammatic thought and her pre-theoretical innate faculty of logica utens, the great mathematician is able to see a theorem as true long before the logical apparatus necessary to demonstrate …Read more