Research Interests
My work centers around answering questions such as:
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What kind of person should we strive to be?​
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How do people become virtuous or vicious?
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What kind of life should we lead?
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Thinking about the implications of what it is to be a virtuous person has led me to consider how being virtuous affects the life of the mind and one's pursuit of intellectual and epistemic goods. I am inclined to think that certain questions in epistemology--what to believe, and under what constraints--are bound up with questions about human flourishing. Consequently, these questions and their respective answers inform my approach to epistemology as part of a holistic enterprise that is agent focused: living a good life plays a fundamental role in the kind of life humans ought to live, and this influences the individual aspects of our lives.
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Dissertation
Writing under the direct supervision of Heather D. Battaly and committee members Paul Bloomfield, Michael Lynch, and Christian B. Miller, I am concerned with questions of how one can develop character (broadly construed as those features that are the bearers of intellectual and/or moral properties, that include virtues and vices). I distinguish between two modes of character development: virtue cultivation and vice amelioration (I currently leave open whether to ameliorate vice just is to cultivate virtue).
One ubiquitous assumption in contemporary virtue theory, ethics, and epistemology is that if we want to change our vices, we first need to be aware of them. If we want to gain virtue and/or shed vices, we need to be aware of where we are at on the path, so to speak, and we need to know how far away we are from the ideal of virtue. Furthermore, consider asking oneself, “How does one get rid of a problem one is not aware of having?”
This awareness assumption and question drive my dissertation research. I articulate and defend a view called Character Growth Externalism (CGE). CGE, modeled after epistemic externalism, denies that a necessary condition of changing our epistemic or moral character is awareness, where I take awareness to be the kind of knowledge one has when one is “self-aware,” i.e., of our capacities, our limitations, what we like, and what we are like.
Though my current dissertation is a work of vice epistemology, CGE has broad applications for virtue theory, ethics, and epistemology.