Research Overview

For access to abstracts and full manuscripts of my publications, see here.

I am interested in the agency we exhibit over which reasons we possess for actions, emotions, and aesthetic responses. Importantly, this agency is not just expresssed individually but can also be shaped communally. This theme is at the root of several publications:

In "Possessing Love’s Reasons: Or Why a Rationalist Lover Can Have a Normal Romantic Life” (Ergo 2021), I argue that rationalism about romantic love is plausible. We can romantically love our partners for their loveable qualities. Importantly, problems for this view can be resolved by paying closer attention to how our agency influences what reasons we possess to romantically love others.
In "Rethinking Low, Middle, and High Art” (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2022), I argue that we can understand the distinction between low, middle, and high art in terms of the accessibility of an artwork's aesthetic qualities to its perceiver. I point out that our aesthetic backgrounds can shape which artworks can count as low, middle, and high art for us. I also show how a form of aesthetic deference is plausible and why low, middle, and high art all play important roles that contribute to a good aesthetic life.
In "Aesthetic Normies and Aesthetic Communities" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2024), I give a definition of the aesthetic normie as someone who is motivated by the drive towards sociality to pursue popular aesthetic items. I then point out the potential moral repercussions of being an aesthetic normie. I then point out that the drive towards sociality can be redirected by being more involved in aesthetic communities. I argue that being a part of these communities can help us become more sensitive to aesthetic reasons and how this can even lead us to be more sensitive to moral reasons.
In "Not Like Us: A Case Study for Aesthetic Contextualism" (British Journal of Aesthetics forthcoming), I argue that the aesthetic practice of creating and writing diss tracks is a case in which the negative moral properties of an artwork can directly (though partially) ground the positive aesthetic properties of an artwork. I argue that the "moralist" debate in aesthetics can benefit from paying closer attention to a wider varierty of aesthetic practices and the ways in which they shape what counts as an aesthetic reason within a particular type of art.

I am also interested in foundational issues in metaethics and practical reasoning. These interests have led to the following publications:

In "How to Choose Normative Concepts" (Analytic Philosophy 2024), I assess Matti Eklund's challenge to ardent realism. I argue that we may either (i) accept that the use of our most fundamental normative concepts requires no further explanation or (ii) that a plausible way to vindicate them is to appeal to a form of pragmatism.
In "Practical Judgment and the Well-Rounded Life" (Inquiry 2025), I argue that recent discussions of grit depend on time-sliced theories of practical reasoning that do not account for how practical reasoning tends to be an extended process that involves juggling multiple difficult long-term ends. I then point out that if we are to live well-rounded lives that involve the pursuit of multiple difficutl long-term ends, we need the virtue of practical judgment. I then given an account of this virtue that is inspired by Tennenbaum's Extended Theory of Practical Rationality on which practical reasoning is best understood as an extended process.

I have several projects in development:

A paper on how aesthetic practices can set norms of appropriateness for A.I. use in art.
A paper that argues for an analogy between moral pragmatist quietism and aesthetic pragmatist quietists.