I study range of issues in empirically informed philosophy, with a focus on how cognition arises and the ways it shapes our social environment. Currently I’m working the following topics:
- I’m continuing to develop ideas from my dissertation, “The Fragmented Mind,” which argues that appeals to working memory cannot adequately explain central cognitive processes. This necessitates a fragmented view of central processes that takes seriously our nature as social creatures.
- “Working memory is not a natural kind and cannot explain central cognition” forthcoming in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology and selected as a runner-up for the 2020 Philosophy of Memory Essay Prize organized by the Centre for Philosophy of Memory at the Université Grenoble Alpes. It underwent a separate blind review process prior to publication.
- Video from Richard Brown’s “Consciousness Live!” podcast on the topic.
- “Working memory is not a natural kind,” presentation at the Neural Mechanisms Online webconference streamed here.
- Investigating the Moral Self grant project, where as a Co-PI, I conducted work in experimental philosophy on the intersection of morality and personal identity. Our team is in the process of finalizing a series of manuscripts based on this work.
– See video from our 2017 SMV presentation. - Collective intentionality: or, how normative relations arise from group coordination. My colleague, Matthew Rachar, and I are working on extensions of this work and how empirically anchored accounts of collective intentionality may parallel classic cases of strategic reasoning, and in some cases provide superior explanations of the group behavior at hand.
I also have an interest in aesthetics, where I look at the ontology of musical instruments and how this can be applied to new media, such as virtual reality and games.
updated 07.2020
