About Me

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. My research interests have ranged widely across philosophy, including topics in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, the philosophy of language, and 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 building the philosophy of conflict into the field that it deserves to be in its own right.

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.

Up Next

I have also completed work on Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law, based on my Hempel Lectures delivered at Princeton University in May 2023, and it will be published by Princeton University Press in late summer/fall 2027. This book develops the foundational theory of interpretive objects deployed in When Things Get Personal and applies it to many other topics, including to the philosophy of law. It is my answer to how and why even the most abstruse questions in philosophy matter for ordinary life.

Also

For a decade I edited the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, a leading model of fully open access, fully university-funded publication in philosophy, and I am the founder and director of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at USC. Much of my professional time is spent advising PhD students in philosophy.