I’m a Postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. I hold a BA from Harvard and an MA and joint degree PhD from the Committee on Social Thought and the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago.
My academic research interests lie at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy (metaethics and moral psychology) and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism (but also Aristotle and Heidegger). The central question guiding my 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. My aim is to show that these forms of dependence and receptivity are not restrictions on human freedom but are rather the conditions for its realization. On the account I propose, human freedom is not the freedom to exercise control over errant emotions and dispositions of character but the freedom from having to expand one's efforts in this way.
I am an editor of The Point, a magazine of philosophical writing on politics, contemporary life, and culture, and my essays and critical reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and The Point (for links, visit "Essays").
My academic research interests lie at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy (metaethics and moral psychology) and the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant and post-Kantian German Idealism (but also Aristotle and Heidegger). The central question guiding my 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. My aim is to show that these forms of dependence and receptivity are not restrictions on human freedom but are rather the conditions for its realization. On the account I propose, human freedom is not the freedom to exercise control over errant emotions and dispositions of character but the freedom from having to expand one's efforts in this way.
I am an editor of The Point, a magazine of philosophical writing on politics, contemporary life, and culture, and my essays and critical reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The TLS, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and The Point (for links, visit "Essays").