My ResearchMy research is primarily about action and perception. I am interested in both their fundamental natures and how they figure in our perspective on the world; their metaphysics and phenomenology. A theme uniting my work is the modal structure of the mind, since all of it concerns our dispositions, tendencies, capacities, and how they link up to make us who we are.
My work on action has focused on issues concerning the lowest limits of agency. It is natural to think that there are peripheral cases of agency, such as habitually biting your nails, or absentmindedly shifting in your seat. But how peripheral are they? A theme in my work is that careful attention to the habitual and mundane shows that they are in fact much more deeply integrated into our rational lives than we might expect. However, I have also recently been thinking about 'negative actions', the boundaries of agency in the natural world, and how those things might be related. In the philosophy of perception, I have focused on questions about the nature and number of perceptual capacities, and what implications this has for contemporary debates about perceptual content. I have also been working on the relation between perceptual experience and intentional action. In particular, I am working on issues about the connection between practical knowledge and perceptual experience which develop some ideas in Merleau-Ponty's work. |
PublicationsPerceptual Capacities, Discrimination, and the Senses - Synthese (2021) - I defend a view of the number and nature of perceptual capacities by engaging with Susanna Schellenberg's recent work. On my view, there are few, coarse-grained perceptual capacities which can fulfill complex explanatory roles because they are evaluatively gradable on many axes. Finally, I argue that it perceptual capacities bear an especially close relation to the sensory modalities. (Read Paper)
Habit-Formation: What's in a Perspective? - Habit in the History of Philosophy (Routledge, eds. Komarine Romdenh-Romluc and Jeremy Dunham, 2022) - I argue that Merleau-Ponty is right to claim that some shift in an agent's perspective on the world is partly constitutive of their forming a habit, but that he is wrong about what this shift is because he wrongly conflates habit and skill. I defend an alternative: the perspectiival shift constitutive of habit-formation is that habitual courses of action come to be and seem familiar. (Read Paper / Read Draft) Review of Jonathan Payton's 'Negative Actions: Events, Absences, and the Metaphysics of Agency' - Philosophical Quarterly (2022) - A review of Payton's recent very good book about 'negative actions' in which I raise a worry about some assumptions about events which sit in the background. (Read Paper / Read Draft) The Force of Habit - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (Forthcoming) - What is the force of habit? I argue for a view on which habit's force is the feeling of familiarity with a course of action, where this presents the habit-bearer with a reason for action in an affectively loaded motivational light. I do this by first showing that an account of habit's force is essential for understanding it's explanatory nature, before arguing against the implicit dominant view that habit's force is it's automaticity. That view is false because things we do habitually are not always done automatically. I then show that the Familiarity View is a satisfying account of habit's force. |
Works in Progress
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