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 functional 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 successfully 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 functional 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 successfully 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.
Publications
Aristotle and the Binds of Natural Slavery, forthcoming in Polis
My aim is to better understand how the ideas found in Aristotle’s account of natural slavery shaped and were shaped by practices of enslavement. I focus on three core aspects of Aristotle’s views on slavery: the animalization of enslaved people, the denial of rationality to natural slaves, and the purported shared interests between natural slaves and natural masters. I argue that, both in practice and in Aristotle's own remarks, this account of natural slavery is highly insulated from evidence that enslaved people were not, in fact, natural slaves. I then show how this put enslaved people in double binds: in many situations, effectively whatever an enslaved person chose to do would have been interpreted as evidence confirming that they were a natural slave. I close by reflecting on how enslaved people in ancient Greece resisted the identity of natural slave that philosophers and enslavers attributed to them.
My aim is to better understand how the ideas found in Aristotle’s account of natural slavery shaped and were shaped by practices of enslavement. I focus on three core aspects of Aristotle’s views on slavery: the animalization of enslaved people, the denial of rationality to natural slaves, and the purported shared interests between natural slaves and natural masters. I argue that, both in practice and in Aristotle's own remarks, this account of natural slavery is highly insulated from evidence that enslaved people were not, in fact, natural slaves. I then show how this put enslaved people in double binds: in many situations, effectively whatever an enslaved person chose to do would have been interpreted as evidence confirming that they were a natural slave. I close by reflecting on how enslaved people in ancient Greece resisted the identity of natural slave that philosophers and enslavers attributed to them.
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.
Other Selected Papers
A Paper on Passions and Surprise in Aristotle (under review)
Prohairesis and Character in Aristotle’s Poetics (draft available upon request)
Aristotle claims that prohairesis is a test for a person’s character. I show how some key, underappreciated passages from Aristotle’s Poetics can help shape our understanding of this practical role prohairesis plays in character attribution. These passages also provide evidence against an influential interpretation of prohairesis from Anscombe, on which a decision only counts as a prohairesis if it is made with a view toward thoughts about living well.
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.
Prohairesis and Character in Aristotle’s Poetics (draft available upon request)
Aristotle claims that prohairesis is a test for a person’s character. I show how some key, underappreciated passages from Aristotle’s Poetics can help shape our understanding of this practical role prohairesis plays in character attribution. These passages also provide evidence against an influential interpretation of prohairesis from Anscombe, on which a decision only counts as a prohairesis if it is made with a view toward thoughts about living well.
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.
