I’m currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project at McGill University (2024–26). I received my PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Irvine (June 2024), after completing an MA in philosophy at Brandeis University. I came to philosophy from art. I received a BFA in studio art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before spending a few years in New York writing about this scene.
My primary research project explores the epistemology of common sense, connecting questions about its putative rational authority with related questions in the philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and social and political philosophy. I often approach these questions through the figures of early analytic philosophy, with an eye both to how we should interpret their ideas and to how they might be used to move contemporary philosophy forward.
Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) was a pivotal figure in early analytic philosophy. Our edited volume—the first to be devoted exclusively to Stebbing’s philosophy—aims to bring her back into focus, showing why she mattered then and why she matters now.
We argue that philosophy progresses much like science—despite deep disagreements—because many disputes remain evidence-responsive within shared intra-theoretical frameworks.
I present a historical discovery that reframes how we should interpret Moore’s proof of an external world—and in particular the familiar charge that it begs the question—by situating the proof within Moore’s sustained pursuit of what I call a “fourth condition” on proof: that a genuine proof must be capable of extending knowledge.
I reexamine the relationship between Stebbing and Moore on common sense, showing that Stebbing’s account is both more distinct from and more indebted to Moore’s than scholars recognize. I argue that their key divergence lies in what I call Stebbing’s unity thesis—the view that common-sense and scientific knowledge form a genuine unity—yielding a dynamic position in which common-sense concepts may be clarified or revised by science, but not displaced wholesale.
I raise two worries about Bergmann’s “autodidactic” method. I then use his view to highlight the limits of rational argument and contrast it with an alternative that also emphasizes the personal nature of philosophical inquiry while remaining more neutral regarding the rational standing of competing intuitions.
[This is my contribution to a workshop on Michael Bergmann’s Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition held at Arizona State University on 7 December 2024. Find Bergmann’s replies here.]
We distinguish two ways in which one may be led to skepticism about philosophical knowledge. We then introduce an alternative, hinge-theoretic account that promises to recover philosophical knowledge while preserving optimism about philosophical progress.
We argue that pervasive disagreement in philosophy—often taken to motivate skepticism about philosophical knowledge—can be reconciled with the possibility of such knowledge.
I introduce the idea of negative Moorean facts—negative existentials that have the status of Moorean certainties—and show how they complicate certain approaches to settling existence debates.