PROJECTS
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
If there’s a through line uniting my philosophical interests, it’s something like Sellars’s conception of the aim of philosophy: I want to know how it all hangs together. In keeping with that ambition, I tend to be interested in relatively foundational issues in philosophy—questions upon answers to which much else hangs.
The questions of earliest and most enduring interest to me in this regard are, firstly, whether God exists, and, secondly, whether extramental reality has a normative component (and if so, what that component is like).
I’m also interested in a number of issues of metaphysics concerning, e.g., grounding, essence, fundamentality, generalized identity, being, modality, and the nominalism versus realism debate.
To an increasingly large extent I’m also interested in questions of meta-metaphysics concerning key relations between mind, language, and the world.
Philosophy of Religion
I am interested in arguments for and against the existence of God. That said, of late my preferred approach in the philosophy of religion has been to prioritize figuring out which are the best theisms and naturalisms for the purposes of proper pairwise comparison (compare Oppy, Naturalism and Religion, 2018). To a large extent this simply means doing philosophy (i.e. figuring out the best views of things), and such philosophy needn't always (and frequently doesn't) fall within the bounds of the philosophy of religion.
Among the cases where such philosophy has fallen within the bounds of the philosophy of religion, two such projects spawned papers (described in greater detail below). The first was a criticism of Robert Adams's (Finite and Infinite Goods, 1999) reductive account of goodness as Godlikeness of a certain sort. The second was a criticism of Joshua Rasmussen's (How Reason Can Lead to God, 2019; Is God the Best Explanation of Things?, 2019) hypothesis that God is fundamentally perfect, and that God's perfection somehow explains God's possession of the perfections.
Normativity
I tend to think that if there's normativity, it's got to be irreducible. But irreducible normativity is multiply problematic. There are metaphysical troubles associated with it, e.g. the trouble of explaining why it should be that there is such a tight, seemingly explanatory connection between normative facts and so-called natural facts if the former are metaphysically discontinuous with the latter. Then there are broadly semantic and epistemic troubles, roughly: how are we able to latch onto irreducibly normative facts and properties in our thought and speech and, having done so, how are we able to learn things about them?
When I am working on normativity, I am usually working on these issues. My research on the metaphysical troubles overlaps with my research on grounding, and has recently taken the form of an investigation into the viability of non-naturalist attempts to posit essence facts as grounds of the grounding of the normative in the non-normative (see, e.g., Leary 2017 and Bengson et al. 2023, 2024). My research on the broadly semantic and epistemic troubles is presently less well-defined, and has consisted largely in background research on, e.g., reference and representation. Such research overlaps with my research in meta-metaphysics. I am currently exploring the merits of a projectivist treatment of the (meta)semantics of non-naturalistic normative cognition.
(Meta-)Metaphysics
I earlier described myself as wanting to know "how it all hangs together" and as "prioritizing figuring out which are the best theisms and naturalisms for the purposes of proper pairwise comparison." Both of these goals motivate my study of a number of issues of first-order metaphysics regarding, e.g., time, properties, resemblance, modality, Platonism vs. nominalism, being, truth, grounding, essence, and fundamentality.
That's a lot of metaphysics! At the start of my philosophical career, I had a rather rose-colored view of metaphysics. That changed when, during my first semester of graduate school, I had a particularly formative encounter with the anti-metaphysical meta-philosophy of Rudolf Carnap by way of an excellent seminar by James Justus. The encounter left me with a fairly well-worked out view of where I disagreed with Carnap's arguments for metaphysical non-cognitivism. However, I have yet to find what I regard as a fully satisfying account of how metaphysics could be cognitive (i.e., how we or any other entity might be capable of representing the world in 'metaphysical' ways), or how it's possible to make (substantive) epistemic headway in metaphysics.
For that reason I am interested in acquiring a better understanding of how mind and language relate to the world. In search of that better understanding I research issues relating to quantification (e.g. higher-order quantification, thing-first-versus-fact-first ontologies, and the possibility of absolutely unrestricted quantification), and representation (the nature of concepts and representation, and the anti-representationalisms of figures like Richard Rorty and Huw Price).
PUBLISHED PHILOSOPHY PAPERS
Paper | 01
"On the Metaphysics of Relation-Response Properties; or, Why You Shouldn't Collapse Response-Dependent Properties Into Their Grounds"
Journal for Ethics and Social Philosophy (2024) Available for Download Here.
ABSTRACT: Certain properties of great interest to philosophers--e.g., blameworthiness, praiseworthiness, desirability, etc.--appear on the basis of their standard English forms of designation to have relation-response structure. In other words, each such property appears on the basis of its standard English forms of designation to be a relational property of a certain sort, viz. the property of standing in a given relation to a given type of response. This presents a question: When we set to theorize any such property, how seriously ought we to take the linguistic appearances? This paper defends an answer, namely: "Seriously." In other words, we ought only to provide analyses of such properties that are faithful to their standard English forms of designation. This thesis is controversial: A number of philosophers of blameworthiness, for instance, seem to violate it outright, whereas other such philosophers--most notably, Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson and David Shoemaker--have argued that its violation follows from a popular combination of views about the natures of certain such properties. In the paper, I defend faithfulness against these latter arguments, and I endeavor to clarify the role that faithfulness plays (and ought to play) in recent debates about the natures of certain value properties.
PAPERS IN PROGRESS
Project | 01
"Why Essential Grounding is False, and Why It Might Have Seemed True"
SUMMARY: Draws an important, often blurred distinction between the content of essence (i.e., what lies in the essence of a thing, or what particularly it is to be or do that thing) and what essence facts ground (i.e., what holds in virtue of what lies in the essence of a thing, or what particularity is to be or do that thing), shows how conflating these things gives rise to the appearance that Essential Grounding—the view that facts of the form [It is essential to xthat p] ground corresponding facts of the form [p]—is true, and argues that once matters are clarified, the apparent attractions of Essential Grounding belong not to it, but to a better, more plausible thesis according to which essence facts ground broadly conditional facts despite lacking broadly conditional contents (in normal cases, anyhow).
Project | 02
"The Source of Normativity?"
SUMMARY: Distinguishes a harder ground-theoretic challenge for non-naturalism about normativity—viz., that of grounding particular facts about the grounding of normative property instantiations in non-normative property instantiations—from an easier ground-theoretic challenge for non-naturalism about normativity—viz., that of grounding generalizations about the grounding the grounding of normative property instantiations in non-normative property instantiations—and argues that recent attempts to posit essence facts as grounds of the grounding of non-naturalist normativity in the non-normative—most notably John Bengson, Terence Cuneo, and Russ Shafer-Landau’s (2023; 2024) and Stephanie Leary’s (2017)—entirely fail to accomplish the harder ground-theoretic task, contra these authors’ apparent ambitions.
Project | 03
"On the Depth of God's Perfection"
SUMMARY: Utilizes recent work on grounding and building to develop and criticize Joshua Rasmussen's recent proposal to the effect that (i) God is fundamentally perfect, and (ii) God’s being perfect explains God’s possession of the various perfections.