About Me

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. My research interests have ranged widely across areas of philosophy that are in some way connected with metaethics, including topics in epistemology, metaphysics, normative ethics, practical reason, and the philosophy of language, and I have also published on the history of ethics.

My current work largely concerns what it is to be a person, and how our answer to that question can help us to understand and navigate interpersonal relationships and interpersonal conflict, as well as the applications of these ideas to other topics in philosophy. I am also especially interested in contributing toward establishing the philosophy of conflict as a central and organizing area of philosophical concern.

Before turning my attention to philosophy full-time, I pursued undergraduate majors at Carleton College in each of philosophy, mathematics, and economics - what I think of as the most methodologically self-conscious fields in each of the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. I still try to bring self-consciousness about methodology to every topic that I tackle in my work.

What I Do

I have recently completed a book exploring the role of reasons in epistemology, titled Reasons First, the second edition of my introductory book Noncognitivism in Ethics, and an introductory book about reasons co-authored with my former student Nathan Howard, The Fundamentals of Reasons. I am currently at work on a book about what philosophical accounts of the nature of persons can tell us about conflict in ordinary human relationships, tentatively titled When Things Get Personal, and on completing and revising the book manuscript for Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law, based on my Hempel Lectures delivered at Princeton University in May 2023.

Other current or long-term projects include exploring the nature of and relationships between many self-other asymmetries in philosophy, editing a book of new work on analytic existentialism with Berislav Marusic, thinking more intensely about the role of information and perspective in normative assessment, and continuing to contribute toward a developing ethics of our mental lives, including thinking about the moral assessment of belief, credence, agnosticism, intention, attention, emotion, and more.

Much of my past research has concerned the nature of the semantics for moral language and the nature of moral thought, reasons and the nature of moral explanations, and related topics in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action, and the history of moral philosophy. More information about all of this past research can be found on this site.

I have just recently stepped down after a decade of editing the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, a leading model of fully open access, fully university-funded publication in philosophy, and am the founder and director of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at USC. The CFCP is devoted to the mission of identifying, encouraging, and promoting work in and adjacent to philosophy that sheds insight into the nature, sources, structure, dynamics, and consequences of interpersonal conflict at all scales.

And finally, much of my professional time is spent advising PhD students in philosophy. Information about many of my past and present students is available on the main page of this site.