I am interested in comparative ethical theory (incl. Aristotle, Thomas, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche). I have taught seminars focussed on Kantian and Hegelian ethics, and have have taught various forms Aristotelian ethics, from seminars focussed exclusively on Aristotle's work (Nichomachean ethics, Metaphysics, de Anima) to contemporary virtue ethics (incl. Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair McIntyre, Rosalind Hursthouse, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond). I am also interested in central questions and challenges within philosophy of action and ethics (inc. Anscombe, Donald Davidson, Christine Korsgaard, as well as a Hegelian alternative to Korsgaard's Constructivism). I am interested in tracing a specific thread in the philosophy of action and ethics from its roots in Aristotle and Kant through Hegel. Broadly, I am interested in skeptically adequate meta-ethical grounds to ethics. To this end, I reflect on how utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontic or a priori ethics, and naturalist ethics get their start. My work in ethics is often drawn to a comparative approach to Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Nietzsche, Anscombe, Foot, Nussbaum, and MacIntyre.
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Within aesthetics I have recently published several articles on the epistemic role of art, as well as on possible reasons for thinking that a certain kind of value in the experience of certain kinds of artworks necessitates treating them as ends in themselves (2023, 2024). I am particularly interested in the axiological worth of art that might be described as a secondary good and attendant on aesthetic experience and dependent on aesthetic conditions.
I am working on a monograph on aesthetics and philosophy of literature, which engages substantially with the work of Martha Nussbaum's Love's Knowledge, the neo-Aristotelian tradition of ethics and aesthetics, and the idealist tradition of epistemology in an account of aesthetics and philosophy of art. In this work, I take up the secondary value that literary art holds for the formation of character and the mind, but argue that to treat art as a means to such ends undermines those very ends.
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Within a theoretical approach to philosophy for mind, I am particularly interested in attempts at answering Agrippan Skepticism from Kant to Hegel and the post-Fregean and Quinian turn in the twentieth century. I am interested in the relevance of Hegel's response to radical skepticism for a range of traditions including Quine's empirical holism, without conceding to radical skepticism as Quine's assertion of the Neurathean Procedure does (and as do many following in the wake of both Frege and Quine). I am also interested in Thomas Nagel's Hegelian leaning realism and forms of constructivism that are philosophically derived from Kant and Hegel. I take particular interest in the aesthetic conditions of mind, the role of the productive imagination in memory, identity, representation, reflection, knowledge, and belief.
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Hegel: my work on Hegel takes seriously Hegel's own attempt at engaging the roots of philosophy in Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Aristotle via the challenges of radical skepticism (Agrippan skepticism). I see Hegel's Logic as fundamentally an attempt at carrying forward Kant's critical turn in a way that answers the charges of Agrippan skepticism and so is a chapter in the long-history of epistemic and metaphysical story of reason. I am further interested in a range of epistemic insights that can be derived from features of Hegel's philosophy of mind, particularly the manner in which he strives to retain key features of both Aristotelian metaphysics (particularly Aristotle's notion of kind-normative necessity) with Kant's critical turn.
Kant: my work engages a range of systematic features of Kant's critical philosophy, with special emphasis on the normative form of the reflecting power of judgment. I have worked on the imagination in Kant's philosophy in particular, to explore an important thread of unity in his critical philosophy that partially gave way to Idealism in the post-Kantian context. In particular, the imagination is the faculty of the mind that Kant defines as the source of synthesis (both pure representation and empirical). I explore the diverse functions of synthesis (yielding unifiable and determinable wholes) that Kant ascribes to it. I am particularly interested in Kant's differentiation of the spontaneity of the mind whereby pure intuitions and pure representations are yielded as a condition of the possibility of self-consciousness, and constituting a part of the pure use of the synthetic unity of apperception in the 'I think.' The imagination comes most fully into view in his account of the source of mixed intuitions for the schemata, as well as empirical intuitions as products of synthesis of manifold wholes from the raw given of sensibility. While each of these functions fall under the theoretical function of the mind and is a condition of the possibility of experience, Kant complicates the picture with the heautonomous or "free lawful" function of the imagination in the reflecting power of judgment (particularly in pure aesthetic judgments). Of particular interest to me is the role of the imagination in yielding aesthetic ideas, which Kant suggests plays an important role in the theoretical function of reason and in the moral (i.e. as symbolic schemata for moral ideas).
I will complete a Habilitation on Kant at the University of Mainz in 2025.
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I am currently applying an epistemic concept of actuality from Hegel's philosophy of mind, which has roots in both Aristotelian metaphysics and Kantian epistemology and ethics to two interrelated issues in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. I take it to helpfully facilitate a (i) ground for differentiating (1) non-self-conscious, non-agential intelligence, from (2) non-self-conscious agency; and from (3) self-conscious agency. Once (2) can be isolated from (1) and (3), then a special problem arises in ethics of AI that requires (ii) differentiating between (a) primary and (b) secondary normativity for non-self-conscious agency, such that (2) might be thought to bear absolute agential responsibility toward such things as possible universal rights of (3) without thereby necessitating the attribution of self-consciousness to such a form of autonomous intelligence. This work looks at the epistemic and ethical normative form across types of AI (LLMs, MM-LLMs, and other forms of A.N.I., to forms of A.G.I., and A.S.I).
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