Research
My work is primarily in Philosophy of Mind, on the topic of Other Minds, and is historically influenced. What has come to be known as the ‘Problem of Other Minds’ in philosophy is usually understood in its epistemological formulation: roughly, ‘how do we know about others’ thoughts and feelings?’, or more radically, ‘how do we know others exist?’. I approach the problem in a not-standardly-epistemological way. The basic view I hold, following the phenomenological tradition, is that there is a sui generis act of consciousness (empathy) that makes other persons available to one as objects of cognition and thought. I also approach the problem of other minds with the conviction that the way philosophers picture human persons’ basic relation to others—even where that concerns knowledge and existence—has consequences in other domains. As Iris Murdoch once wrote: ‘Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.’ (‘Metaphysics and Ethics’) Our picture of our most basic relation to others can be a blueprint for how we relate to others.
One consequence of our picture of our understanding of other people can be seen in how we understand self-knowledge. Some of my work concerns the role that other people play in oneself (think: constitution, or character) and one’s knowledge of oneself. Another consequence of the picture we offer of others comes up in the context of moral psychology: I think about the difference that a genuinely separate and different point of view can make to our emotional responses, judgments about right and wrong, and so on. Although I think there are many more tentacles belonging to the topic, these are two directions my thinking has gone in recently.
Papers
(selected; drafts available upon request)
“Knowing Who I Am” (under review)
“A Problem about Our Awareness of Others” (in preparation)
“Plotinus on the Recognition of Moral Beauty” (in preparation)
“What Is It to Read?” (in progress)
In ordinary discourse we say we read things like books and newspapers, but we also say we read music, that one can “read the room”, and other non-verbal things. I am interested in exploring the way in which reading might involve “other-directed intentionality”; in other words, that when we read our thought is directed toward, is of or about, others’ thoughts. I want to argue that if that is right, then reading presupposes a more basic other-directed intentionality, namely empathy. This would help to shed light on the common intuition that reading helps with, or in some way facilitates a greater capacity for, empathy.
“Empathic Realism” (in progress)
A long-standing debate in metaethics concerns the question of whether moral propositions are truth-apt. It is usual to suppose that commitment to moral realism involves a commitment both to the claim that moral propositions are truth-apt (cognitivism) and that some are true, thus explaining our intuition that morality is objective, in the sense that it concerns mind-independent reality. I am interested in exploring the possibility that one can defend moral realism without defending cognitivism. Specifically, I want to explore the idea that our ability to empathize other people provides us with a certain mind-independent reality—particular others, and communities—that serves as the source of our values, and thus the foundation of our moral judgments, but that this does not commit us to the thought that moral knowledge is best understood as propositional knowledge (as is implied by cognitivism).