I’m a Postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. I graduated from the University of Chicago in Summer 2017 with a joint degree PhD from the Committee on Social Thought and the Philosophy Department.
My research interests lie at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy (metaethics, practical reason, and moral psychology), and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism (but also Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Heidegger). The central question guiding my philosophical research is how to best to understand the nature of our dependence on conditions that lie beyond our individual rational control and choice: our emotions, our character and other persons—be they caretakers, teachers or our fellow political subjects. My aim is to show that these forms of dependence need not be thought of as restrictions on human freedom. Instead I want to recover from the philosophical tradition and develop for a contemporary audience an account of freedom that is centered on a kind of rationality whose paradigmatic instantiation is not in calculation and choice but in what I call "rational receptivity."
Before coming to the University of Chicago, I studied English literature at Harvard, and I remain keenly interested in the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis.
I am also a contributing editor for The Point, a thrice-yearly “journal of ideals” which publishes philosophical essays on politics, contemporary life, and culture (see more under "Essays").
My research interests lie at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy (metaethics, practical reason, and moral psychology), and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism (but also Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Heidegger). The central question guiding my philosophical research is how to best to understand the nature of our dependence on conditions that lie beyond our individual rational control and choice: our emotions, our character and other persons—be they caretakers, teachers or our fellow political subjects. My aim is to show that these forms of dependence need not be thought of as restrictions on human freedom. Instead I want to recover from the philosophical tradition and develop for a contemporary audience an account of freedom that is centered on a kind of rationality whose paradigmatic instantiation is not in calculation and choice but in what I call "rational receptivity."
Before coming to the University of Chicago, I studied English literature at Harvard, and I remain keenly interested in the relationship between philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis.
I am also a contributing editor for The Point, a thrice-yearly “journal of ideals” which publishes philosophical essays on politics, contemporary life, and culture (see more under "Essays").