Me

After completing a two year visiting commitment at Weber State University and after completing my Ph.D. at the University of Utah,  I began a visiting position this fall in the Philosophy department at the University of Wyoming, filling in for Susanna Goodin while she’s on a sabbatical leave.  I work on a variety of topics in metaphysics and ethics, and I specialize in the ontology of action and events.  My dissertation addresses the problem of act individuation.  The problem of act individuation is an attempt to decipher how ordinary folks distinguish between actions.  The problem is understood best through an example.  Suppose that Smith moves her hand, pulls the lever, lifts a heavy weight, and scares Jones.  Is Smith’s moving her hand the same thing as her scaring Jones? Action theorists, such as, e.g., Donald Davidson, Alvin Goldman, and Judith Jarvis Thomson, have argued for a simple invariant account of act identity.  Although each of their views differ in substantive ways, they all contend that their view is consistent with ordinary pretheoretic conceptions of action.  What I show through some empirical work — which is best exemplified by work in “experimental philosophy” — is that invariant accounts fail to appreciate the complexity and flexibility of ordinary folk intuitions on act individuation.  I defend the view that the valence of the consequences of action plays the central theoretical role in people’s views of individuating action, and, hence, the folk account of act individuation.  What I hope to accomplish in the not-too-distant future is a monograph on the problem of act individuation, especially its relation to ordinary intuitions and its relevance to issues in applied ethics. Also, I am putting together a proposal for an anthology on the structure and function of thought experiments in philosophy.