Persons, Identity, and Conflict

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Finally, since 2017 my research has been concerned more and more with the nature of persons and the consequences of that for understanding friendship, interpersonal conflict, silencing, responsibility, personal identity, paternalism, meaning in life, and more.

So far, this work has resulted in several papers, and I have presented parts of it at Stanford, Pittsburgh, UC-Santa Cruz, USC, the Royal Institute for Philosophy, the University of Illinois, SUNY Buffalo, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Arizona, Dartmouth University, Colgate University, Syracuse University, UCLA, the University of Virginia, and the University of Texas.

I’ve become impassioned by this project, as it promises to draw on and illuminate my past interests while offering simple tools that are easy to translate outside of philosophy. It has also inspired my creation of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project at USC. The next step of this research program is to bring together some of the most central ideas into a book about what philosophical theories of the self can tell us about conflict in interpersonal relationships, tentatively titled When Things Get Personal and based on the Mangoletsi-Potts lectures that I gave at Leeds University in May and June 2023.

This project has also grown into more fully developing the foundations of the interpretive theory of persons that I think underlies so many fruitful applications, and extending that theoretical framework to think about other topics in philosophy, including in aesthetics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of law. The main thread through this more foundational and extended work is developed in my book manuscript in progress, Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law, based on my Hempel Lectures delivered at Princeton University in May 2023.

Discord

  • ‘Conflict, Discord, and Strife.’ Unpublished paper.

    In this paper I introduce the concept of discord, and show how views on which attributability interpretation is value laden can make sense of how discord can make conflict persist even between well-meaning people. See video, below.

  • ‘Discord as Interpretive Mismatch.’

    In this not yet shareable draft I offer a more direct treatment of discord and its importance than in ‘Conflict, Discord, and Strife.’

  • ‘Illusions of Ill Will’.

    In this paper in progress, delivered so far at Toronto and St. Andrews, I explore how the concept of illusions of ill will is helpful in order to more systematically understand how conflict can divide us unnecessarily, and why no solution to this structural problem can be perfect.

Particular Kinds of Conflicts

  • ‘Attributive Silencing.’ Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 12: 170-192, July 2022.

    In this paper I elaborate on the concept of attributability or “deep self” silencing introduced by Mary Kate McGowan. I argue that this constitutes an especially important kind of silencing that is especially likely to help us to understand important social phenomena.

  • ‘Treating Like a Child.’ Analytic Philosophy 63: 73-89, October 2020.

    In this paper I consider why paternalism is not always wrong, and whether that is better explained by the status of children or by the relationship between children and their parents. I argue for the latter thesis.

  • ‘Tipping Points: Abuse and Transformative Discovery.’ Paper draft.

    In this paper I argue that the twin roles of agency and the good in good interpersonal interpretation can help us to make sense both of why it is so difficult to apply Maya Angelou’s advice that “when someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time” and why we can suddenly undergo interpretive shifts that make it look like this should have been obvious all along.

 

Persons

  • ‘Persons as Things.’ Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 9: 95-115, November 2019. Forthcoming in Chinese translation in Philosophical Analysis.

    This paper is a kind of extended response to Rae Langton’s article ‘Duty and Desolation.’ It’s the first paper that I wrote in this major new turn in the direction of my research.

  • ‘Person as an Evaluative Concept.’

    So far, this paper consists merely in a Zoom talk that I gave in summer 2020. (See recording, below.)

Prezi slides from Hempel Lectures delivered in May 2023 on the topic of Interpretive Objects: Meaning in Language, Life, and Law.

Narrative and Identity

  • ‘Why You’ll Regret Not Reading This Paper.’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 85: 135-186, August 2019.

    This paper takes up a puzzle about the significance of anticipated regret in major life decision making, and argues that its answer turns on the importance of our narrative relation to our own lives.

  • ‘Narrative and Personal Identity.’ Aristotelian Society suppl volume 96(1): 209-226, June 2022.

    In this paper I introduce connections between personal identity over time, in space, and in quality, and argue that what they share in common is narrative in structure.

  • 'Authorial Freedom.’  Forthcoming in Marusic and Schroeder, eds., Analytic Existentialism.  Oxford University Press, 2024.

    In this paper I lay out an extended analogy between existentialist freedom and authorship of a serial novel, and defend it against objections.

  • ‘The Join.’ Unpublished short story.

    This short story constitutes an answer to one of Parfit’s particularly complex cases of personal identity over time.