Published Work
Making Sense of Racial Membership
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2024
Abstract: Which individuals belong to a racial group, and what determines membership? I argue that questions about membership are importantly different from questions regarding the ontological status of racial categories, and invite a distinctive line of inquiry into the nature of racial groups. But there’s a challenge to providing determinate and consistent answers to membership questions: as has been documented in sociology and psychology, there are many phenomena wherein reasonable disagreement about racial membership systematically arises. The challenge is formidable, at least in that an influential variety of social constructionism which attempts to ground the existence and extension of racial groups in widespread representations cannot clear this obstacle. While the philosophical puzzle of racial identity remains unsolved, we emerge with new appreciation for how issues of racial membership are a distinctive part of it.
Kant's Monstrous Claim: Schopenhauer on the Intuitive Intellect and the Cognition of Causes
In The Schopenhauerian Mind, 2024
Abstract: This paper concerns a neglected aspect of Schopenhauer’s mature thought and how it is influenced by Kant’s critical philosophy, namely, his philosophy of mind and the distinction between the faculties of sensibility, the understanding, and reason. In this context we find what Schopenhauer claims to be Kant’s “monstrous” and “major and fundamental mistake,” namely, “the failure to distinguish between abstract, discursive cognition, and intuitive cognition” (WWR 503). Shopenhauer argues that the intellect and intuition turn out to be much more closely intertwined than Kant allowed – in fact, the “intuition is intellectual” (e.g., FR 54, 75; VC 213; WWR 471) and, conversely, “the intellect is intuitive” (e.g., FR 76; WWR 483). The main goal of the paper is to reconstruct Schopenhauer’s account of the tight relation between the cognitive faculties, with an eye to how it constitutes a departure from Kantian orthodoxy. A clear and substantive disagreement between Schopenhauer and Kant emerges from this analysis: contra Kant, Schopenhauer holds that the understanding’s cognition of causation is indiscriminate, that is, blind and unsystematic, and so non-conceptual.
Kant on Why We Can't Know Things in Themselves
with Andrew Chignell
In The Palgrave Kant Handbook, 2017
An opinionated overview of the literature regarding Kant's doctrine of noumenal ignorance, including a presentation of the authors' own views on the matter. I argue that, for Kant, we cannot have substantive, positive cognition of things in themselves because we cannot form determinate -- and hence truth-evaluable -- judgments about them.
Papers under Review
[Paper on Faculty Monism in 18th century Leibnizian philosophy]
Kant often criticizes Leibniz for collapsing two cognitive faculties -- sensibility and the understanding -- into a single one. In the picture Kant attributes to Leibniz, we can sense things via merely thinking about them. Is this account coherent, and was this picture really prevalent in 18th century Leibnizian philosophy? In this paper, I argue for an affirmative answer to both questions. Sensation, for the Leibnizians, is a kind of thinking. In fact, I argue, faculty monism was an influential research project in the 18th century Leibnizian tradition, with its own distinctive theoretical commitments, predictions, and explanatory challenges.
[Paper on Kant's theory of representation, consciousness, and cognition]
I provide an account of an important sense of representation, consciousness, and cognition in Kant's lectures on logic and his critical works. I argue that neither of these notions involves transparency, i.e., first-personal awareness at the agential level. Instead, I outline a picture according to which the presence and content of cognitions is opaque to cognitive subjects.
[Paper on Kant's notion of an intuition]
In this paper, I argue that, for Kant, intuitions are singular in the sense that they are thoroughgoingly determined representations of their objects. That is, for any representable feature F of the object of cognition o, an intuition of o must represent F to the subject. In this sense, intuitions are maximally fine-grained: they distinguishing their objects from any other. Moreover, this account of the content of intuitions elucidates how the historical pedigree of Kant’s theory of intuitions is squarely in the Leibnizian tradition.
Work in Progress
(Please email for an up-to-date copy)
[Paper on Anne Conway and monism]
[Paper on Kant's critique of metaphysics]
[Paper on Leibniz's theory of sensation]
[Paper on whether the history of a racial category elucidates its nature]
[Paper on ontological oppression]
[Paper on deference to experts about racial classifications]
[Paper providing a positive account of the ontology of racial categories]