If I mistakenly hear you ask for directions to the “shore” when instead you asked for directions to the “store,” the miscommunication is probably an innocent mistake. If, on the other hand, a man misunderstands a woman’s refusal of his sexual advances as consent, the mistake seems like it might...
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2)...
This dissertation is about three of Cicero’s notable projects in ideal theory in his middle and late periods (between roughly 54-43 BCE). It comes during a resurgence in interest in Cicero’s contributions as a philosopher. First, I discuss Cicero’s philosophical account of vera gloria (true glory) in contradistinction to mere...
This dissertation has two main aims. The first is to show that relying on the testimony of others is not as “epistemically special” as many epistemologists have made it out to be. More specifically, I argue that relying on someone’s testimony neither provides us with a non-evidential, epistemic reason to...
My dissertation draws on Heideggers interpretation of Kant to argue that Kant overestimates the role that causality plays in structuring our experience. Heidegger suggests that Kants analysis of experience mistakenly universalizes a fraction of our experience: the experience of material things. I defend the merits of this suggestion by offering...
Artificial agent development is motivated by the dream of making machines perform undesirable labor instead of humans. To replace humans in undesirable labor, it follows that the machines should not engage in actions that will lead to devastating consequences. They should be “moral” artificial agents. In my paper, I deal...
In this dissertation I pose a new puzzle about desire, one grounded in three plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions. According to the standard view in metaphysics, (1) all desires are dispositional states. Epistemologists, though, think that (2) we have privileged access to some of our desires. But (3) it is...
This dissertation consists of three self-standing essays, each of which focuses on a dialogue from Plato's later period. Together, they touch on some of his well-known views in metaphysics and moral psychology, from his theory of forms to his theory of the tripartite soul. But the topic that unifies these...
As Wilfrid Sellars put it, one of the principal aims of philosophy "is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." In this I think Sellars is right: the discipline is charged with taking a "synoptic...
In this thesis, I argue that life and soul as analyzed in De Anima are examples of what Aristotle calls a "pros hen legomena" structure, a structure in which various things are said to be living in relation to one thing, which is the central meaning of life. The various...