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.

What I Do

In the last few years I have published 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, and edited this book with Berislav Marusic. My next book, When Things Get Personal: A Philosophical Guide to Conflict, will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2026. It is about what can go wrong when our skill at distinguishing signal from noise in interpersonal interpretation gets misapplied - and about why we make the kinds of mistakes that we do. It is an exercise in what philosophical accounts of the nature of persons can tell us about conflict in ordinary human relationships.

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.

Other current or long-term projects include exploring the nature of and relationships between many self-other asymmetries in philosophy, 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.

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. 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.