Publications
“Warranted Group Belief,” Erkenntnis (2025). [Penultimate draft]“The Four Causes of Sex,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 2024 (Forthcoming). [Penultimate draft]“Aristotle’s Many Lives,” BioCosmos 5 (2025): 29–40. [Penultimate draft]“Aristotle’s Infallible Perception,” Apeiron 52.4 (2019): pp. 415-443. [Penultimate draft]“Warranted Catholic Belief,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 97.2 (Spring 2023). [Penultimate draft]In Progress
A paper on Aristotle's definition of tragedy in Poetics 6
A paper defending the justice of punitive wars (under review)
A paper on Aristotle’s action theory regarding virtuous and sudden actionsAbstract: In Nicomachean Ethics 3.2 and 3.8, Aristotle apparently contradicts himself, first denying that any sudden actions are decided upon and then later saying that the courageous person does decide upon sudden actions. I argue that Aristotle is committed to the first claim and that a better translation of the NE 3.8 passage avoids the contradiction: the courageous person decides to endure sudden dangers. This leaves us with another puzzle: how does the courageous person have enough time to deliberate and then decide in the face of sudden danger? I propose a distinction between imminent dangers and dangers that appear out of nowhere to resolve this puzzle. Only the latter sort of sudden danger is relevant in NE 3.8. Finally, I argue that since virtuous actions are based on a decision and no sudden actions are decided upon, Aristotle is committed to there being no sudden virtuous actions. Despite these actions' not being virtuous, they are still the right thing for one to do. This suggests the limits of Aristotle's virtue ethics: there may be cases where the virtuous person cannot act virtuously, and non-virtuous sudden actions may be the best way to act.
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.