About Me

Philosophical Persona

I am an old-school systematic metaphysician in a new-school specialized world. I also introduce elements of pragmatism and social justice into high church analytic metaphysics (and vice versa).

Social Ontology (The Spatial Theory)

In social ontology,1 I argue for a spatial, scalar theory of social categories. Instead of identifying as men or women, many people now identify as non-binary, agender, or genderqueer. Instead of identifying as gay or straight, many people now identify as bisexual, pansexual, or demisexual. There is an emerging shift away from identifying with the standard binary gender (male/female) and sexual orientation (gay/straight) categories. This shift has frightened some and been a source of confusion for others. My new book presents a new way to understand gender and sexuality beyond the binary categories: the spatial theory. On this view, gender and sexuality are best understood as social spaces that individuals locate themselves within. For a longer summary, see my book page.

More broadly, my work in social ontology explores the idea of social indeterminacy and vagueness. The social world seems vague, at many cases. It is vague whether a certain law applies, whether a certain person counts as eligible to be a member of a group, whether a certain social norm is being obeyed. What do we think of such cases? And what do we do in such cases? My work explores the idea that the social world is really, truly, genuinely, deeply indeterminate.

Social Philosophy (Social Movements)

Much of my recent work in social philosophy concerns the philosophy of social movements: what social movements are, what agency within them looks like, and what makes that agency go well or badly.

In “Social Change, Solidarity, and Mass Agency”, I argue that transformative social change is typically driven by mass agents — large, complex, geographically dispersed collectives like the working class or a social movement’s base. Standard theories of collective agency are built for small, tightly coordinated groups, but they struggle to explain mass agents. I develop a solidarity theory of mass agency, on which mass agents are composed of organizers, who share the intentions and commitments demanded by traditional accounts of collective action, and supporters, who participate by standing in solidarity with organizers rather than by sharing their intentions outright. “What Is Factionalism?” addresses the internal conflicts that plague social movements. The traditional view is that factionalism is merely instrumentally bad; it is bad because it is an obstacle to movements’ external goals. Against this view, I argue that factionalism is best understood as a form of anti-solidarity power; factional agency doesn’t just frustrate collective aims, it reshapes movement participants into agents unable or unwilling to jointly author social change together. In a slogan: factionalism atomizes.

In “Critical Social Ontology and Social Movements”, I turn to a practical worry facing politically engaged philosophers: how can an article in a specialist journal possibly matter to a real social movement? I argue that the worry rests on an individualistic picture of scholarly impact. Once critical social ontologists see themselves as participants embedded within a movement rather than isolated brokers of ideas, and adopt what Raimo Tuomela calls we-mode thinking, their scholarship can be evaluated — and can succeed — by very different standards than those of traditional academic philosophy. You can see this article as a companion to an earlier article, “Critical Social Ontology”, which defines and defends critical social ontology.

General Metaphysics (Neo-Idealism)

Outside of social ontology and social philosophy, my main research project defends a new version of philosophical idealism. Traditionally, metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality; metaphysics is neither a conceptual nor empirical inquiry. Idealism, in contrast, holds that reality itself depends in some sense on mind or language. I ask: can reflection on our concepts alone teach us something substantive about the nature of reality, independently of further empirical facts? I answer: yes!

I explore the idealist idea in a few papers. Building on recent work by Thomas Hofweber, I explore approaches to metaphysics that appeal to inescapable concepts — concepts we cannot rationally give up for the purposes of inquiry, such as truth, fact, and the basic concepts of logic. In “Relatively Inescapable Concepts”, I extend Hofweber’s framework by arguing that inescapability should attach to families of concepts, individuated by function, rather than to individual concepts. In “Neo-Hegelian Idealism”, I go even further, giving a historicist account of idealism, influenced by thinkers like Robert Brandom and Hegel. “Logical Inferentialism Implies Logical Idealism” defends a conditional claim: if logical inferentialism is true, then idealism (more generally) is true.

In the past, I have also defended pluralism about metaphysical grounding. For more specific examples of my research, see my publications page.

Areas

Areas of Specialization: Metaphysics, Social Ontology, Social Philosophy

Areas of Competence: Philosophy of Language, Social Philosophy, Logic

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | PhD in Philosophy | 2012 - 2017

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | BA in Philosophy | 2008 - 2012

Spirit Animal

The octopus. I have my hands on a lot of things.