I work primarily in metaphysics, secondarily in the history of philosophy, and I have serious research interests in ethics.
Metaphysics
I have worked on a variety of topics in metaphysics, including the metaphysics of parts and wholes, persistence over time, possibility and necessity, properties and propositions, and fundamentality and grounding.
My recent work has primarily focused on questions in ontology.
Ontology is the study of being. One goal of ontology is to discover what it is to be a particular kind of entity. For example, there are large literatures on the questions “what is it to be a physical object?” and “what is it to be a feature or property of an object?” The most fundamental question in ontology is the unqualified question “what is it to be?”
I have focused on some old debates concerning both on what expressions such as “existence”, “being”, and “there is” mean, and on the nature of being and existence. There are certainly different kinds of existing things. But are there different kinds of existence, or does every kind of thing, regardless of what kind of thing it is, exist in the same way? Are there degrees of being, or does everything that there is exist to the same extent?
These questions are admittedly incredibly abstract, but I believe that they connect in important ways of important areas of philosophy and beyond. Here I’ll briefly mention some connections.
The Philosophy of Time: Do past and future objects exist in the same way as presently existing things? In what ways could our reactive attitudes (such as grief or hope or expectation) be appropriate or inappropriate partially in virtue of the different ways in which past, future, and present things exist? Do the results of contemporary physics suggest that past, present, and future things all exist in the same way? If past objects don’t exist in any way at all, what does this imply about the study of history?
Philosophy of Mathematics: There are people in the room. There are prime numbers between 1 and 10. Are there prime numbers in the same way that there are people? If so, does this mean that the ways in which we come to know facts about persons is basically the same way in which we knows facts about numbers?
Ethics: Similar questions can be raised about the status of values. But there are also interesting questions about the connection between ontological status and ethical status that I am exploring. To what extent should our theorizing be oriented towards the fully real? How should our conception of ourselves change in light of views about what kind of existence we have? (What about other entities, such as, e.g., corporations? Does their ontological status have implications for their normative status?)
Philosophy of Culture: Philosophers and thinkers in different cultures have had different views about what exists. But, in addition, is it possible to have different concepts of existence? And if it is possible, can or must these different notions be competitors? (What would it even mean to say that these different notions are in competition? What would we have to presuppose to make sense of the idea that there can be competition between different concepts of existence?)
History of Philosophy: Similar questions arise for philosophers and thinkers in different eras. This is one reason why a portion of my active research agenda is devoted towards assessing and evaluating historical answers to the questions I am working on.
Philosophy of Language: To the extent that views about reality are widespread, we might expect there to be linguistic reflections of those views. One possible linguistic reflection might be the presence of different senses of the various ontological phrases such as “there is”, “exists”, “being”, “Es gibt”, “Sein”, etc. both within a given language and across different languages. Another possible reflection might be in our reaction to so-called category mistakes, such as “The number two is hungry” and “The table is a prime number”. Such sentences seem to be not merely false but worse: they seem to be not even grammatical. And one standard way of cashing out why they are not grammatical appeals to different senses of “being”.
I have recently published a book titled the Fragmentation of Being on these topics, and I have continued to work on these topics and related ones since.
History of Philosophy
In the history of philosophy, I have written on well-known canonical figures like F.H. Bradley, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Kierkegaard, and McTaggart, and I plan to continue working on them in future projects.
I am also interested in rediscovering and exploring philosophers whose work is less well-known; I have been investigating figures from the early part of the 20th century, which is a fascinating time for the history of philosophy. Recently, I have published on several historically important yet unfortunately currently neglected women philosophers from this period: Mary Whiton Calkins, who was an early American absolute idealist and the first woman President of the American Philosophical Association, Susanne Langer, who I believe was the first philosopher to use the phrase “analytic philosopher” along with an explicit rationale for grouping philosophers under that heading, and Edith Stein, who was Husserl’s first research assistant (and who was followed in that position by Heidegger) and an important phenomenologist in her own right, as well as a canonized Catholic saint.
Finally, I also have interests in non-western philosophy, and have recently published two papers on existence in early Indian Buddhist philosophy. (See also.)
Ethics
In ethics, my main research interest is in value theory. I have published on the question of whether an adequate value theory must recognize more than one form of non-derivative goodness. I have co-written two articles with Ben Bradley on the nature of desire and the consequences of our theory of desire for topics in ethics, including on the question of whether death is bad for a person only insofar as they have desires of a certain type. I am also interested in the connections between ethics and metaphysics, some of which are explored in chapter six of the Fragmentation of Being, and in a recent paper in which I explore whether the notion of metaphysical priority can be explained in normative terms such as obligation. Also related is a critical study I did of Matti Eklund’s book Choosing Normative Concepts.
Brief descriptions of and links to each of my publications can be found here.
And an up-to-date online version of my CV can be found here.