About Me

I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California. My interests range 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.

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, 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, and am 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 preparing the Carl Hempel Lectures to be delivered at Princeton University in May 2023, tentatively titled Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law. 

Other current or long-term projects include exploring the nature of and relationships between many self-other asymmetries in philosophy, an introductory book about reasons co-authored with my former student Nathan Howard, editing a book of new work on analytic existentialism with Berislav Marusic, converting my book Noncognitivism in Ethics into a second edition, and thinking more intensely about the role of information and perspective in normative assessment.

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 also edit 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 supporting philosophical work that sheds insight into the nature, sources, structure, and dynamics 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.