Published
The Normative/Agentive Correspondence. The Journal of Transcendental Philosophy. 2020.
This is my attempt to bridge the gap between Robert Brandom's account of the mind, articulated in normative vocabulary, and the sort of account offered by some of his closest critics such as John McDowell, James Conant, and Sebastian Rödl, articulated in principally agentive modal vocabulary. On the account I propose, these two sorts of accounts are really two perspectival sides of the same multi-perspectival coin. (open access)
Pointing out the Skeptic's Mistake. Florida Philosophical Review. 2014.
I wrote this paper as an undergrad (it was actually my writing sample for grad school), and I still don't hate it. In it, I defend Donald Davidson's transcendental argument against Cartesian skepticism by giving it a Moorean spin. (open access)
Drafts
Sellars's Ontological Nominalism
In Fall 2019, I was a visitor at Pittsburgh, working with Robert Brandom, and I sat in on Brandom's course on Wilfrid Sellars. I grew increasingly frustrated with Brandom's claim that Sellars's ontological nominalism was unintelligible, and so I decided to write this paper, where I argue that Sellars's ontological nominalism is not only intelligible but actually made intelligible by the theory of conceptual content that Brandom develops.
Frege and the Logical Notion of Judgment
In attempting to familiarize myself with Begriffsschrift notation, I ended up writing this paper. I argue here that there is a tension in Frege's mature philosophy concerning the place of the judgement stroke in his logical notation, but there were seeds of a very different conception of logic in his early writing where the judgment stroke is not at all out of place.
Can the Content of Perception be Conceptual?
This is a paper I wrote for a conference on the work of Mathew Boyle in Leipzig. In it, I respond to Boyle's criticism of John McDowell's conceptualist account of perceptual content, proposing and developing the agentive conception of perceptual experience that I also put forward in "The Normative/Agentive Correspondence" in response to his criticisms.
Propositions and the Power to Represent
This was my "preliminary essay" for my Ph.D. program at University of Chicago. In it, I present a new argument for the act-based conception of propositions, arguing that propositions do not represent things as being certain ways, as is widely taken to be the case; rather, we represent things as being certain ways, and propositions are our acts of doing so.
The Normative/Agentive Correspondence. The Journal of Transcendental Philosophy. 2020.
This is my attempt to bridge the gap between Robert Brandom's account of the mind, articulated in normative vocabulary, and the sort of account offered by some of his closest critics such as John McDowell, James Conant, and Sebastian Rödl, articulated in principally agentive modal vocabulary. On the account I propose, these two sorts of accounts are really two perspectival sides of the same multi-perspectival coin. (open access)
Pointing out the Skeptic's Mistake. Florida Philosophical Review. 2014.
I wrote this paper as an undergrad (it was actually my writing sample for grad school), and I still don't hate it. In it, I defend Donald Davidson's transcendental argument against Cartesian skepticism by giving it a Moorean spin. (open access)
Drafts
Sellars's Ontological Nominalism
In Fall 2019, I was a visitor at Pittsburgh, working with Robert Brandom, and I sat in on Brandom's course on Wilfrid Sellars. I grew increasingly frustrated with Brandom's claim that Sellars's ontological nominalism was unintelligible, and so I decided to write this paper, where I argue that Sellars's ontological nominalism is not only intelligible but actually made intelligible by the theory of conceptual content that Brandom develops.
Frege and the Logical Notion of Judgment
In attempting to familiarize myself with Begriffsschrift notation, I ended up writing this paper. I argue here that there is a tension in Frege's mature philosophy concerning the place of the judgement stroke in his logical notation, but there were seeds of a very different conception of logic in his early writing where the judgment stroke is not at all out of place.
Can the Content of Perception be Conceptual?
This is a paper I wrote for a conference on the work of Mathew Boyle in Leipzig. In it, I respond to Boyle's criticism of John McDowell's conceptualist account of perceptual content, proposing and developing the agentive conception of perceptual experience that I also put forward in "The Normative/Agentive Correspondence" in response to his criticisms.
Propositions and the Power to Represent
This was my "preliminary essay" for my Ph.D. program at University of Chicago. In it, I present a new argument for the act-based conception of propositions, arguing that propositions do not represent things as being certain ways, as is widely taken to be the case; rather, we represent things as being certain ways, and propositions are our acts of doing so.
