Research Overview
My research focuses on how affect, especially emotions, can help us make hard choices and navigate a complex social world. I approach these questions from both historical and contemporary angles. The historical ideas I engage with most are from ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, as well as the development of ancient Greek ideas in Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. My research ranges across contemporary moral psychology and ethics, along with questions about the emotions in social-political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.
My dissertation develops an Aristotelian account of the passions, which focuses on how passions shape what is salient to us and motivate us to solve problems. I show how this account can help us provide an Aristotelian model of how self-control works, understand why pleasure perfects activity, and shed insight on contemporary debates about the normative significance of emotions. The first three chapters draw especially on Aristotle's Rhetoric, an underappreciated part of Aristotle's work that I hope to show is rich and interesting.
Please find below abstracts of my dissertation chapters and other selected papers. In addition to these topics, I am especially interested in talking to people about (1) how emotions bear on questions about learning in children, non-human animals, and machines and (2) how social and political institutions shape and are shaped by human emotions.
My dissertation develops an Aristotelian account of the passions, which focuses on how passions shape what is salient to us and motivate us to solve problems. I show how this account can help us provide an Aristotelian model of how self-control works, understand why pleasure perfects activity, and shed insight on contemporary debates about the normative significance of emotions. The first three chapters draw especially on Aristotle's Rhetoric, an underappreciated part of Aristotle's work that I hope to show is rich and interesting.
Please find below abstracts of my dissertation chapters and other selected papers. In addition to these topics, I am especially interested in talking to people about (1) how emotions bear on questions about learning in children, non-human animals, and machines and (2) how social and political institutions shape and are shaped by human emotions.
Dissertation Chapters
Aristotle on the Function of Passions (draft available upon request)
Much of the attention on Aristotle's account of the passions in Rhetoric II has focused on the metaphysical question of what the passions are. Comparatively less has been paid to how the passions function in our cognitive economies. This paper aims to develop a functional account of the passions, focusing especially on how passions (i) shape what is salient to us and (ii) motivate cognition and action. I first aim to distinguish passions from beliefs by arguing from a number of Aristotle's examples that belief in the content of a given passion is neither necessary nor sufficient for having that passion. I then show how salience and motivation help explain key differences between passion and belief. The positive account of salience, motivation, and passions that I develop draws heavily on Aristotle's Rhetoric, as well as his psychological, and ethical treatises.
An Aristotelian Model of Self-Control (draft available upon request)
My aim in this paper is to answer this question of how Aristotle takes self-control to work. On the model I develop, self-control is a form of intrapersonal persuasion that paradigmatically occurs by changes in an agent’s passions. I begin the paper by developing a model of interpersonal persuasion via the passions from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I then show how this model of interpersonal persuasion illuminates self-control as intrapersonal persuasion. I draw on Aristotle’s ethical and psychological treatises to defend the model in three parts. First, I argue that self-controlled agents face contrary motivations in the nonrational soul and aim to change these motivations. Second, I argue that these motivational changes are paradigmatically changes in an agent’s passions. Third, I argue that exercises of self-control are a distinct skill that often involves (i) vivifying relevant evaluative features and (ii) engaging in mental activities like attending to, imagining, and remembering. I close the paper by briefly considering how Aristotle’s account of self-control improves upon Plato’s charioteer model. I suggest that Aristotle—at least in his better moments as a philosopher—offers us a rich historical source for a more promising model of self-control than the inhibitionist model that has been predominant in the history of philosophy and psychology.
Passions and Perfected Activity
This paper aims to better understand Aristotle's famous claim in EN X.4 that pleasure perfects activity "like the bloom on those in the prime of youth." I consider how Aristotle's explanation of passions in terms of pleasures and pains helps illuminate the claim that pleasure perfects activity. First, I offer some central cases from Aristotle in which pleasant passions could perfect activity. They do so, I argue, because passions make us attentive to and appreciative of an activity's positive evaluative features. Second, I consider how well these central cases generalize to understanding pleasure as the perfection of all activities. Finally, I raise some worries about whether pleasure, rather than pain, perfects activities where painful emotions are clearly most apt. I argue that Aristotle has mixed views on these cases across his work and offer an assessment of their philosophical plausibility.
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.
Much of the attention on Aristotle's account of the passions in Rhetoric II has focused on the metaphysical question of what the passions are. Comparatively less has been paid to how the passions function in our cognitive economies. This paper aims to develop a functional account of the passions, focusing especially on how passions (i) shape what is salient to us and (ii) motivate cognition and action. I first aim to distinguish passions from beliefs by arguing from a number of Aristotle's examples that belief in the content of a given passion is neither necessary nor sufficient for having that passion. I then show how salience and motivation help explain key differences between passion and belief. The positive account of salience, motivation, and passions that I develop draws heavily on Aristotle's Rhetoric, as well as his psychological, and ethical treatises.
An Aristotelian Model of Self-Control (draft available upon request)
My aim in this paper is to answer this question of how Aristotle takes self-control to work. On the model I develop, self-control is a form of intrapersonal persuasion that paradigmatically occurs by changes in an agent’s passions. I begin the paper by developing a model of interpersonal persuasion via the passions from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I then show how this model of interpersonal persuasion illuminates self-control as intrapersonal persuasion. I draw on Aristotle’s ethical and psychological treatises to defend the model in three parts. First, I argue that self-controlled agents face contrary motivations in the nonrational soul and aim to change these motivations. Second, I argue that these motivational changes are paradigmatically changes in an agent’s passions. Third, I argue that exercises of self-control are a distinct skill that often involves (i) vivifying relevant evaluative features and (ii) engaging in mental activities like attending to, imagining, and remembering. I close the paper by briefly considering how Aristotle’s account of self-control improves upon Plato’s charioteer model. I suggest that Aristotle—at least in his better moments as a philosopher—offers us a rich historical source for a more promising model of self-control than the inhibitionist model that has been predominant in the history of philosophy and psychology.
Passions and Perfected Activity
This paper aims to better understand Aristotle's famous claim in EN X.4 that pleasure perfects activity "like the bloom on those in the prime of youth." I consider how Aristotle's explanation of passions in terms of pleasures and pains helps illuminate the claim that pleasure perfects activity. First, I offer some central cases from Aristotle in which pleasant passions could perfect activity. They do so, I argue, because passions make us attentive to and appreciative of an activity's positive evaluative features. Second, I consider how well these central cases generalize to understanding pleasure as the perfection of all activities. Finally, I raise some worries about whether pleasure, rather than pain, perfects activities where painful emotions are clearly most apt. I argue that Aristotle has mixed views on these cases across his work and offer an assessment of their philosophical plausibility.
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.
Selected Other Papers
The Dreadful, Mortal Soul in Plato's Timaeus (draft available upon request; presenting at the 2023 Central APA)
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.
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.
