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Why Vice Doesn’t PayAncient Philosophy 44 (2): 385-405. 2024.
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Aristotle on Softness and Endurance: Nicomachean Ethics 7.7, 1150a9–b19Phronesis 69 (1): 63-96. 2024.In Nicomachean Ethics 7.7 (= Eudemian Ethics 6.7), Aristotle distinguishes softness (malakia) from lack of self-control (akrasia) and endurance (karteria) from self-control (enkrateia). This paper argues that unqualified softness consists of a disposition to give up acting to avoid the painful toil (ponos) required to execute practical resolutions, and (coincidentally) to enjoy the pleasures of rest and relaxation. The enduring person, in contrast, persists in her commitments despite the painful…Read more
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Is there an epistemic advantage to being oppressed?Noûs 57 (3): 618-640. 2023.Do the oppressed have an epistemic advantage when it comes to knowing about the systems that oppress them? If so, what explains this advantage? In this paper, I consider whether an epistemic advantage can be derived from the oppressed's contingent tendency to have more relevant experiences and motivation than the non‐oppressed; or, alternatively, whether an advantage derives from the oppressed's very lived experience, thus being in principle unavailable to the non‐oppressed. I then explore the p…Read more
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Psychological disease and action-guiding impressions in early StoicismBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (5): 784-805. 2021.The early Stoics diagnose vicious agents with various psychological diseases, e.g. love of money and love of wine. Such diseases are characterized as false evaluative opinions that lead the agent to form emotional impulses for certain objects, e.g. money and wine. Scholars have therefore analyzed psychological diseases simply as dispositions for assent. This interpretation is incomplete, I argue, and should be augmented with the claim that psychological disease also affects what kind of action-g…Read more
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Why De Anima Needs III.12-13In Gweltaz Guyomarc'H., Claire Louguet, Charlotte Murgier & Michel Crubellier (eds.), Aristote et l'âme humaine: lectures de De anima III offertes à Michel Crubellier, Peeters. pp. 329-350. 2020.The soul is an explanatory principle of Aristotle’s natural science, accounting both for the fact that living things are alive as well as for the diverse natural attributes that belong to them by virtue of being alive. I argue that the explanatory role of the soul in Aristotle’s natural science must be understood in light of his view, stated in a controversial passage from Parts of Animals (645b14–20), that the soul of a living thing is a “complex activity” of its organic body. This paper explor…Read more
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A Nonideal Theory of Sexual ConsentEthics 131 (2): 270-292. 2021.Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such …Read more
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Empathy and the Value of Humane UnderstandingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1): 50-65. 2022.Empathy is a form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective‐taking. It is also the unique source of a particular form of understanding, which I will call humane understanding. Humane understanding consists in the direct apprehension of the intelligibility of others’ emotions. This apprehension is an epistemic good whose ethical significance is multifarious. In this paper, I focus on elaborating the sense in which humane understanding of others is non‐instrumentally valuable to its recipient…Read more
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Structure and Aim in Socratic and Sophistic MethodHistory of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 23 (1): 143-166. 2020.I begin this paper with a puzzle: why is Plato’s Parmenides replete with references to Gorgias? While the Eleatic heritage and themes in the dialogue are clear, it is less clear what the point would be of alluding to a well-known sophist. I suggest that the answer has to do with the similarities in the underlying methods employed by both Plato and Gorgias. These similarities, as well as Plato’s recognition of them, suggest that he owes a more significant philosophical and methodological debt to …Read more
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The Mixed Constitution in Plato’s LawsTandf: Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1-18. forthcoming.
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Games and the art of agencyPhilosophical Review 128 (4): 423-462. 2019.Games may seem like a waste of time, where we struggle under artificial rules for arbitrary goals. The author suggests that the rules and goals of games are not arbitrary at all. They are a way of specifying particular modes of agency. This is what make games a distinctive art form. Game designers designate goals and abilities for the player; they shape the agential skeleton which the player will inhabit during the game. Game designers work in the medium of agency. Game-playing, then, illuminate…Read more
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From Biological Functions to Natural GoodnessPhilosophers' Imprint 19. 2019.Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism aims to place moral virtue in the natural world by showing that moral goodness is an instance of natural goodness—a kind of goodness supposedly also found in the biological realm of plants and non-human animals. One of the central issues facing neo-Aristotelian naturalists concerns their commitment to a kind of function ascription based on the concept of the flourishing of an organism that seems to have no place in modern biology. In this paper, I offer a nove…Read more
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What do our impressions say? The Stoic theory of perceptual content and belief formationApeiron 52 (1): 29-63. 2019.Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitabl…Read more
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What If Well-Being Measurements Are Non-Linear?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (1): 29-45. 2019.Well-being measurements are frequently used to support conclusions about a range of philosophically important issues. This is a problem, because we know too little about the intervals of the relevant scales. I argue that it is plausible that well-being measurements are non-linear, and that common beliefs that they are linear are not truth-tracking, so we are not justified in believing that well-being scales are linear. I then argue that this undermines common appeals to both hypothetical and act…Read more
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Aristotle |
Well-Being |
Virtue Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
History of Western Philosophy |
Social and Political Philosophy |