I am an Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the philosophy department at the University of Pennsylvania. In the 21-22 AY I will be a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

In June 2013 I completed my PhD in philosophy at Princeton University. I was advised by Michael Smith and Thomas Kelly. My Erdős number is 5. For more on my academic heritage, see this page.

​Prior to starting at Penn, I was a post-doctoral researcher at Franklin & Marshall College. ​Before coming to Princeton, I received an MA from the philosophy department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before going to the Great Plains, I graduated from Arizona State University with Bachelor of Arts degrees in philosophy and political science. ​During the 17-18 AY I was a Marie S. Curie FCFP Junior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the Albert-Ludwig-Universität Freiburg

My main interests are in ethical theory, epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of perception. Issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind are also intimately connected to my work.

My dissertation was a systematic defense of the claim that what it is to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons you possess. A substantially revised version came out in 2018 with Oxford University Press. In 2016 Oxford University Press published Weighing Reasons, a collection I co-edited with Barry Maguire. I am currently writing a book about the connections between the epistemology of ethics, the epistemology of aesthetics, and the philosophy of perception. For more information on all three books, see the book page.

To find out more about my work—past, present, and future—see this page.  A CV (in pdf format) can be found by clicking on the button below.

CV

Last Updated: June 2021