Research Overview
My research focuses on how affect, especially emotions, can help us navigate our complex social world. I primarily write on the way philosophers in ancient Greece, especially Aristotle, thought about these issues. I have sustained interests in bringing historical insights to bear on contemporary moral psychology and ethics, along with questions about emotions and learning in social-political philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.
My dissertation develops Aristotle's funtional account of the passions. I especially focus on how passions shape what is salient to us and motivate us to act. I then bring this account to bear on questions of (1) how passions succesfully help humans, other animals, and children navigate the world; (2) why Aristotle describes self-control in terms of intrapersonal persuasion; and (3) how Aristotle thinks the virtuous person navigates affective dilemmas. The dissertation draws heavily on Aristotle's Rhetoric, which I hope to show sheds light on longstanding debates about Aristotle's moral psychology and points us toward interesting new questions for research.
My dissertation develops Aristotle's funtional account of the passions. I especially focus on how passions shape what is salient to us and motivate us to act. I then bring this account to bear on questions of (1) how passions succesfully help humans, other animals, and children navigate the world; (2) why Aristotle describes self-control in terms of intrapersonal persuasion; and (3) how Aristotle thinks the virtuous person navigates affective dilemmas. The dissertation draws heavily on Aristotle's Rhetoric, which I hope to show sheds light on longstanding debates about Aristotle's moral psychology and points us toward interesting new questions for research.
Dissertation Chapters
A paper on Aristotle's account of the passions (under review)
A paper on Aristotle and self-control (under review)
Aristotle on Affective Dilemmas (draft available upon request)
Aristotle claims that it is impossible to feel some passions, such as anger and fear, at the same time. His reasons for making this claim about anger and fear, I argue, are grounded in both his understanding of the material nature of these passions and the way these passions influence our attention. I further argue that this type of incompatibility between passions leads to affective dilemmas: cases where a person must choose (in a sense) between two incompatible passions, each of which would accurately represent how things are in the world. I then consider different sources of textual evidence in Aristotle for understanding how the virtuous person should navigate an affective dilemma, suggesting that the virtues serve as ideals that guide virtuous responses to affective dilemmas.
A paper on Aristotle and self-control (under review)
Aristotle on Affective Dilemmas (draft available upon request)
Aristotle claims that it is impossible to feel some passions, such as anger and fear, at the same time. His reasons for making this claim about anger and fear, I argue, are grounded in both his understanding of the material nature of these passions and the way these passions influence our attention. I further argue that this type of incompatibility between passions leads to affective dilemmas: cases where a person must choose (in a sense) between two incompatible passions, each of which would accurately represent how things are in the world. I then consider different sources of textual evidence in Aristotle for understanding how the virtuous person should navigate an affective dilemma, suggesting that the virtues serve as ideals that guide virtuous responses to affective dilemmas.
Selected Other Papers
A paper on Aristotle's account of prohairesis in the Poetics (R&R)
Natural Slavery in Theory and Practice (draft available upon request)
My aim in this paper is to better understand how Aristotle's theory of natural slavery shaped the attitudes of slaveowners in ancient Greece and, in turn, shaped the way enslaved people navigated their world as enslaved people. I use Aristotle's discussion of natural slavery and other historical sources to argue that, in practice and in Aristotle's own remarks, the theory of natural slavery is resistant to evidence that enslaved people were not, in fact, natural slaves. I argue that this put enslaved people in what scholars (e.g. Frye, Hirji) have called "oppressive double binds." I then consider the evidence we have of how enslaved people resisted the identity of natural slave that philosophers and slaveowners attributed to them.
Fit, Virtue, and Identity: A Constitutive Account (draft available upon request, previously presented as "Why Feel Fittingly?")
Recent work on the normative significance of fitting emotions can be broadly grouped into two approaches. Some philosophers aim to capture the normative significance of fitting emotion types in terms of their consequences on things we value. Other philosophers have pushed back against this approach by emphasizing that fitting emotions are a distinct cognitive good. In this paper, I offer a third, distinctive approach for thinking about the normative significance of fitting emotions, which I call constitutivism. I argue that much of the normative significance of fitting emotions stems from the fact that emotions are a constitutive part of the virtues and identities that matter to us. I argue that unlike the two predominant approaches, constitutivism can both (i) capture the normative phenomenology of making hard choices about what fitting emotions to cultivate and (ii) account for rich variation in normative significance across a range of fitting emotions.
The Dreadful, Mortal Soul in Plato's Timaeus (draft available upon request)
The Young Gods of Plato’s Timaeus are set with a difficult task: embodying the immortal soul. The embodied existence of humans, alongside the existence of other creatures, is necessary for the cosmos to be “sufficiently complete.” (41c) But our bodily nature brings with it another kind of soul, too: a mortal one, fused together from a variety of different ‘dreadful disturbances,’ sense-perception, and an all-venturing lust (69d). Yet we are reminded repeatedly throughout the Timaeus that it is necessary for the Young Gods to furnish us with a mortal soul. They execute this task carefully, with the placement, function, and relations of each part being the best they can possibly be within the constraints of mortality and necessity. So the story of human creation is also a story of teleology. We are thus left with a delicate interpretive task: explaining the dreadfulness of the mortal given its careful creation by divine handiwork. Call this the task of developing a dreadful teleology. I begin by reviewing the dreadful teleology of the appetitive soul, explaining why the disturbances of the appetitive soul are both necessary and dreadful. I then argue that while Timaeus offers us a clear account of the teleology of the spirited part of the soul within the creation account, making sense of its dreadfulness is more challenging. I take up this challenge in the rest of the paper.
The Phenomenology of Hard Choices: What Parity Can and Can't Explain (draft available upon request)
Ruth Chang has argued that parity explains the phenomenology of hard choices better than two of the foremost competing explanations: indeterminism, which holds that it is indeterminate whether the options that comprise hard choices are better than, worse than, or equal to one another and incomparabilism, on which the options that comprise hard choices cannot be properly compared by a single common measure. I contend that parity fares better on neither front. I focus in the first part of the paper on a purported problem for indeterminism: the way we resolve hard choices is markedly different than the way we resolve disagreements about vague predicates. I develop an explanation of this asymmetry and argue that although indeterminism fails to provide a rational decision procedure for resolving hard choices, it shares this feature with parity. The second half of the paper focuses on Chang’s claim that incomparabilists are committed to a radically revisionary and nonrational account of hard choices. In response to this objection, I first offer several plausible ways incomparabilism can capture the ordinary phenomenology of hard choices. I then admit that while Chang’s argument against incomparabilism succeeds under key assumptions about the nature of practical reason, it does so at the cost of ruling out the possibility of incomparable choices altogether. I conclude by arguing that the phenomenology of hard choices ultimately does not count as significant evidence in favor of parity.
Diagnosing Akrasia: Harmonizing Aristotle’s Diverging Accounts (draft available upon request)
Aristotle’s account of akrasia presents significant interpretive difficulties for those attempting to understand his moral psychology. I argue that Aristotle’s insistence that the akratic does not act with a choice (prohairesis) helps illuminate his account of akrasia: it proves resources for uniting his apparently divergent explanations of akrasia as an instance of ignorance and akrasia as an overpowering desire. I locate akrasia’s choiceless nature in the akratic’s lack of a moral state—a deficiency that prevents her from relating her circumstances to her conception of eudaimonia. If the akratic does not relate her circumstances to her conception of eudaimonia, neither her knowledge nor her rational desire are active, and she instead acts in accordance with her appetites. This unity is an improvement to interpretations which have difficulty accommodating either the accounts of akrasia found in Nicomachean Ethics or De Anima. Moreover, my emphasis on the importance of the akratic’s perception connects well with Aristotle’s notion of phantasia, an area ripe for further research in Aristotle’s moral psychology.
Natural Slavery in Theory and Practice (draft available upon request)
My aim in this paper is to better understand how Aristotle's theory of natural slavery shaped the attitudes of slaveowners in ancient Greece and, in turn, shaped the way enslaved people navigated their world as enslaved people. I use Aristotle's discussion of natural slavery and other historical sources to argue that, in practice and in Aristotle's own remarks, the theory of natural slavery is resistant to evidence that enslaved people were not, in fact, natural slaves. I argue that this put enslaved people in what scholars (e.g. Frye, Hirji) have called "oppressive double binds." I then consider the evidence we have of how enslaved people resisted the identity of natural slave that philosophers and slaveowners attributed to them.
Fit, Virtue, and Identity: A Constitutive Account (draft available upon request, previously presented as "Why Feel Fittingly?")
Recent work on the normative significance of fitting emotions can be broadly grouped into two approaches. Some philosophers aim to capture the normative significance of fitting emotion types in terms of their consequences on things we value. Other philosophers have pushed back against this approach by emphasizing that fitting emotions are a distinct cognitive good. In this paper, I offer a third, distinctive approach for thinking about the normative significance of fitting emotions, which I call constitutivism. I argue that much of the normative significance of fitting emotions stems from the fact that emotions are a constitutive part of the virtues and identities that matter to us. I argue that unlike the two predominant approaches, constitutivism can both (i) capture the normative phenomenology of making hard choices about what fitting emotions to cultivate and (ii) account for rich variation in normative significance across a range of fitting emotions.
The Dreadful, Mortal Soul in Plato's Timaeus (draft available upon request)
The Young Gods of Plato’s Timaeus are set with a difficult task: embodying the immortal soul. The embodied existence of humans, alongside the existence of other creatures, is necessary for the cosmos to be “sufficiently complete.” (41c) But our bodily nature brings with it another kind of soul, too: a mortal one, fused together from a variety of different ‘dreadful disturbances,’ sense-perception, and an all-venturing lust (69d). Yet we are reminded repeatedly throughout the Timaeus that it is necessary for the Young Gods to furnish us with a mortal soul. They execute this task carefully, with the placement, function, and relations of each part being the best they can possibly be within the constraints of mortality and necessity. So the story of human creation is also a story of teleology. We are thus left with a delicate interpretive task: explaining the dreadfulness of the mortal given its careful creation by divine handiwork. Call this the task of developing a dreadful teleology. I begin by reviewing the dreadful teleology of the appetitive soul, explaining why the disturbances of the appetitive soul are both necessary and dreadful. I then argue that while Timaeus offers us a clear account of the teleology of the spirited part of the soul within the creation account, making sense of its dreadfulness is more challenging. I take up this challenge in the rest of the paper.
The Phenomenology of Hard Choices: What Parity Can and Can't Explain (draft available upon request)
Ruth Chang has argued that parity explains the phenomenology of hard choices better than two of the foremost competing explanations: indeterminism, which holds that it is indeterminate whether the options that comprise hard choices are better than, worse than, or equal to one another and incomparabilism, on which the options that comprise hard choices cannot be properly compared by a single common measure. I contend that parity fares better on neither front. I focus in the first part of the paper on a purported problem for indeterminism: the way we resolve hard choices is markedly different than the way we resolve disagreements about vague predicates. I develop an explanation of this asymmetry and argue that although indeterminism fails to provide a rational decision procedure for resolving hard choices, it shares this feature with parity. The second half of the paper focuses on Chang’s claim that incomparabilists are committed to a radically revisionary and nonrational account of hard choices. In response to this objection, I first offer several plausible ways incomparabilism can capture the ordinary phenomenology of hard choices. I then admit that while Chang’s argument against incomparabilism succeeds under key assumptions about the nature of practical reason, it does so at the cost of ruling out the possibility of incomparable choices altogether. I conclude by arguing that the phenomenology of hard choices ultimately does not count as significant evidence in favor of parity.
Diagnosing Akrasia: Harmonizing Aristotle’s Diverging Accounts (draft available upon request)
Aristotle’s account of akrasia presents significant interpretive difficulties for those attempting to understand his moral psychology. I argue that Aristotle’s insistence that the akratic does not act with a choice (prohairesis) helps illuminate his account of akrasia: it proves resources for uniting his apparently divergent explanations of akrasia as an instance of ignorance and akrasia as an overpowering desire. I locate akrasia’s choiceless nature in the akratic’s lack of a moral state—a deficiency that prevents her from relating her circumstances to her conception of eudaimonia. If the akratic does not relate her circumstances to her conception of eudaimonia, neither her knowledge nor her rational desire are active, and she instead acts in accordance with her appetites. This unity is an improvement to interpretations which have difficulty accommodating either the accounts of akrasia found in Nicomachean Ethics or De Anima. Moreover, my emphasis on the importance of the akratic’s perception connects well with Aristotle’s notion of phantasia, an area ripe for further research in Aristotle’s moral psychology.
