Publications

In Progress

Projects

Aristotle on the Causes of Tragedy

Aristotle’s Poetics 6 offers a real definition of tragedy, in particular a definition that explains the existence of tragedy on the basis of its four causes. The parts of a tragedy are its material cause, its dramatic form its formal cause, and the feelings of pity it arouses in the audience and the subsequent catharsis these bring about are its final cause. More controversially, I argue that the efficient cause of tragedy is just the action it is a mimesis (imitation/reproduction) of. Hence, just as the unity of efficient causes is a necessary condition for the unity of the movement they cause in the Physics, so too the unity of the action imitated is a necessary condition for the unity of the tragedy itself. Hence, surprisingly, the metrical form becomes inessential to a literary piece—something whose appropriateness or lack of appropriateness is to be explained on the basis of other aspects of it such as whether the piece relates the imitated action dramatically or narratively. Rather, the action as the efficient cause determines the nature of the tragedy—something which I will argue is of a piece with Aristotle’s theory of efficient causation more generally. One consequence of Aristotle’s account is that it is mistaken to distinguish the form and content of a piece in the way we typically do where one could have essentially the same content presented in different literary genres. For Aristotle, a poetic piece’s nature is determined by what it is an imitation of.

Warranted Catholic Belief

Collective epistemology is a relatively new sub-field of epistemology that investigates the nature and properties of group belief and other collective epistemic attitudes. I’m working on a project to develop a novel account of the warrant of group beliefs based on Alvin Plantinga’s proper functionalist account of warrant. In my piece “Warranted Catholic Belief,” I apply this model of group warrant to the beliefs of the Catholic Church. In subsequent work, I aim to develop an account of how the beliefs of individual Catholics have both prima facie warrant in virtue of group testimony provided by the Catholic Church and to consider how such individuals can overcome defeaters for this belief.