Contemporary political theorists have tended to ignore the question of parental authority in their exploration of the nature and origins of political authority. Nevertheless, seminal …
My dissertation aims at throwing new light on the problem of agency, by pursuing a reductionist project about agent causation. In Chapter 1, I provide …
Surprising observations should not steer us toward alternative hypotheses of objective chance, because the pattern-seeking aspect of human psychology gives rise to irrational feelings of …
We take ourselves to be able to access the truth about logic, mathematics, and other nonempirical matters, but it is difficult to reconcile the possibility …
One of Aristotle’s core theses is hylomorphism, the view that things are composed of matter (hule) and form (morphe). In recent years, Aristotle’s hylomorphism has …
There has been increasing attention to the pervasiveness of so-called “bad sex”: apparently consensual sexual encounters that are nonetheless experienced as violating, degrading, and even …
In this thesis, I explore the relevance of computational reinforcement learning to the philosophy of rationality and concept formation. I first argue that the framework …
Recently, a literature has arisen around a novel semantic paradox, known as the v-Curry. Modeled after Curry’s paradox, we begin with the sentence “the inference …
This work addresses a cluster of problems in action theory, philosophical aesthetics, and moral psychology. The first three chapters present an account whereby a class …
This dissertation attempts to answer three related questions about so-called "structural injustice". First, what features of structural injustice distinguish it from mere collections of injustices …
The “conceptualism” debate asks whether perception is conceptual or nonconceptual. It has arisen in different forms and guises throughout the history of philosophy. This thesis …
This dissertation explores the relationship between individuals’ everyday actions and the justice or injustice of entire societies. It is a conceptual and sociological investigation of …
Explanations can be perplexing. Suppose you want to explain why something, A, happens by pointing to something else, B. For this explanation to be illuminating, …
Externalism in the philosophy of language and mind is often thought to be supported by a series of thought-experiments that probe everyday speakers’ intuitions. Nowadays, …
Increasing sensitivity to the moral significance of coordinated and uncoordinated human activity has led many philosophers to claim that individuals can be blameworthy for harms …
This dissertation consists of three related but self-contained papers. The first clarifies what some philosophers have thought to be an epistemological problem for metaethical realism: …
This dissertation consists of three independent but related papers on the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The overarching theme is that it is most fruitful …
Abstract of “Kant and the Problem of the Regulative” by Thomas Moore, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2020 The distinction between the regulative and the constitutive …
Abstract of “Kant on the Intertwining of Individual Moral Development and Ethical Community” by Emily Hodges, Ph.D., Brown University, February 2022 I seek to resolve …
At present, there is little consensus in the secondary literature about how to understand Kant’s metaethical position. In the space of contemporary metaethical theories, neither …
This dissertation focuses on Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and his late ethical writings. In these works, Kant becomes increasingly concerned with …
These collected papers explore the question of moral progress, particularly in light of the extraordinary shifts in moral belief witnessed in the past 300 years. …
Many believe that some normative standpoints have a certain authority that others lack. Only some normative standpoints, the thought goes, tell us what we "really" …
The broad question of this dissertation is how, if at all, one’s moral theories should relate to their moral beliefs and their motivations. The first …
I examine four non-impersonal, welfarist approaches to population ethics that have been discussed in the literature: presentism, necessitarianism, soft comparativism, and actualism. I provide an …
The two main claims of my dissertation are summarized in its contradictory-sounding title: "Nothing Is Bad, and so Is Suffering." Across three interrelated papers, I …
In this dissertation I aim to develop and defend an account of moral offence. This concept, first introduced by Roderick Chisholm, is characterized by action …
In the 2020 presidential elections, Democratic nominees in the primaries all had proposals to advance society and do what’s “good.” Various proposals included distributive justice …
Free will skepticism—a term that encompasses multiple arguments that cast doubt upon our free will—is on the rise in recent decades, especially in response to …
This dissertation is about the epistemic significance of disagreement. Recently, several philosophers have offered some prima facie compelling arguments and thought experiments for a kind …
Both anti-Humeanism and moral particularism have received a great deal of attention in the wake of John McDowell's suggestive writings on these topics. However, most …
In this dissertation I elaborate and defend a version of nonreductive physicalism. Nonreductive physicalism has been the dominant view in the philosophy of mind over …