PROJECTS
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
My work tends to focus on what I take to be relatively fundamental questions of philosophy—i.e., questions upon answers to which much else hangs. To date, the better part of that work has focused on
Metaphysics, with primary focus on essence, grounding, and higher-order metaphysics, and,
Metaethics (or Metanormative Theory), with primary focus on metanormative non-naturalism and the metaphysical, normative, and metasemantic challenges it faces.
Other areas of active and enduring interest to me include
Metametaphysics, with primary focus on key relations between mind, language, and world, Rudolf Carnap’s anti-metaphysicalism, and certain descendants thereof (e.g., Agustín Rayo’s anti-metaphysicalism), and,
Philosophy of Religion, with primary focus on the theism-naturalism debate.
For more details, see the following.
Metaphysics
At heart, I am a philosophical generalist: I want to know how it all hangs together. The way I tend to pursue this goal is by focusing on what I take to be especially deep or fundamental questions. This motivates my study of various questions of metaphysics: about the natures of being, existence, identity, and objecthood; about the existence and natures of abstract objects; about reality's fineness of grain; about the nature of possibility and necessity; about the explanatory roles of laws and powers; etc. I am also deeply interested in the metaphysics of normativity and the atheism versus theism debate; but for these, see the relevant subsequent sections.
Interested though I am in these metaphysical topics and more besides, the largest part of my work in metaphysics to date has focused on grounding and essence (or, as I prefer to think of latter: higher-order identity [cf. Rayo 2015; Correia & Skiles 2019]). Thus, my dissertation defends higher-order analyses of essence (Chs. I and III) and grounding (Ch. IV), as well as a number of significant results with respect to the explanatory roles of essence facts (Chs. II, III, and IV). It then brings these results to bear on the metaphysics of non-naturalist normativity, arguing particularly that several prominent non-naturalists have critically misunderstood the explanatory powers of essence facts (Ch. V). For brief summaries of some of these projects, see the works in progress section below.
My work on the dissertation has produced a couple "spin-off" projects, also summarized below.
Metametaphysics
That's a lot of metaphysics! At the start of my philosophical career, I had a rose-colored view of metaphysics. That was challenged when, over the course of my time pursuing my Master's at Florida State, I had particularly formative encounters with the anti-metaphysical metametaphysics of Rudolf Carnap by way of several excellent seminars by James Justus. The encounters left me with a fairly well-worked out view of where I disagree with Carnap's case for metaphysical non-cognitivism. However, I have yet to find what I regard as a fully satisfying account of how metaphysics could be cognitive (i.e., how we or any other entity might be capable of representing the world in metaphysical ways). For that reason I am interested to better understand how mind and language relate to the world; a project that leads me to consider issues in areas ranging from philosophy of mind (e.g., the natures of representation, consciousness, and perception), philosophy of language (e.g., the natures of reference and truth), and meta-metaphysics proper (e.g., metaphysical realism and the systems of certain of its [Neo-]Carnapian antagonists, most chiefly including Carnap himself and Agustín Rayo).
Metaethics (or Metanormative Theory)
I incline toward thinking that if there is normativity, it has got to be irreducibly normative. But irreducibly normative normativity is variously problematic. There are metaphysical problems associated with it, e.g. the problem of explaining why it should be that there is such a tight, seemingly explanatory connection between normative facts and natural facts if the former are metaphysically discontinuous with the latter. There are broadly semantic and epistemic problems. In the form of questions: How are we able to latch onto irreducibly normative facts and properties in our thought and speech and, having done so, how are we able to learn things about them? There are also normative problems. In the form a question: Why care about normativity if it is irreducibly normative (if, in other words, normative statuses do not reduce to statuses we are antecedently concerned with, such as that of being happiness maximizing or desire-satisfying or what have you)?
When I am thinking about normativity, I am typically thinking about these issues. My research on the metaphysical problems overlaps my research on grounding, and has recently taken the form of an investigation into the viability of non-naturalist attempts to posit essence facts as grounds of the grounding of the normative in the non-normative (see, e.g., Leary 2017 and Bengson, Cuneo, & Shafer-Landau 2023, 2024). For more details on this project, see my dissertation summary in the "(Meta-)Metaphysics" section below, as well as the work-in-progress paper summaries below that.
Relatedly, my 2024 article "On the Metaphysics of Relation-Response Properties; or, Why You Shouldn't Collapse Response-Dependent Properties Into Their Grounds," published in Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, generalizes and develops Gideon Rosen’s ground- and essence-theoretic framework for theorizing relation-response properties—properties like blameworthiness, desirability, etc.—and then leverages that framework to clarify the debate between response-dependence and response-independence theories of value properties. Along the way, I rebut arguments from Justin D’Arms, Daniel Jacobson, and David Shoemaker purporting to establish that popular ways of theorizing certain relation-response properties require us to identify them with their unique universal immediate grounds.
My research on the broadly semantic and epistemic problems for normative non-naturalism is presently less well-developed, and has consisted largely in background research on key mind-language-world relations. Such research overlaps my research in meta-metaphysics. I am however currently exploring the merits of a projectivist treatment of the (meta)semantics of non-naturalistic normative cognition.
Philosophy of Religion
I am interested in arguments for and against the existence of God. That said, of late my preferred approach in the philosophy of religion has been to prioritize figuring out which are the best theisms and naturalisms for the purposes of proper pairwise comparison (compare Oppy, Naturalism and Religion, 2018). To a large extent this simply means doing philosophy (i.e. figuring out the best views of things), and such philosophy needn't always (and frequently doesn't) fall within the bounds of the philosophy of religion.
Among the cases where such philosophy has fallen within the bounds of the philosophy of religion, one such project spawned an as-yet-unpublished paper ("On the Depth of God's Perfection"), previously a finalist for the Marc Sanders Prize in Philosophy of Religion, which clarifies and and criticizes the proposal that God is fundamentally perfect, and that God's perfection somehow explains God's possession of the perfections. Further details may be found in the summaries of papers in progress below.
PUBLISHED PHILOSOPHY PAPERS
Paper | 01
"On the Metaphysics of Relation-Response Properties; or, Why You Shouldn't Collapse Response-Dependent Properties Into Their Grounds"
Journal for Ethics and Social Philosophy (2024) Available for Download Here.
ABSTRACT: Certain properties of great interest to philosophers--e.g., blameworthiness, praiseworthiness, desirability, etc.--appear on the basis of their standard English forms of designation to have relation-response structure. In other words, each such property appears on the basis of its standard English forms of designation to be a relational property of a certain sort, viz. the property of standing in a given relation to a given type of response. This presents a question: When we set to theorize any such property, how seriously ought we to take the linguistic appearances? This paper defends an answer, namely: "Seriously." In other words, we ought only to provide analyses of such properties that are faithful to their standard English forms of designation. This thesis is controversial: A number of philosophers of blameworthiness, for instance, seem to violate it outright, whereas other such philosophers--most notably, Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson and David Shoemaker--have argued that its violation follows from a popular combination of views about the natures of certain such properties. In the paper, I defend faithfulness against these latter arguments, and I endeavor to clarify the role that faithfulness plays (and ought to play) in recent debates about the natures of certain value properties.
PAPERS IN PROGRESS
Project | 01
"Against Essential Grounding; Against Finean Primitivism"
(Late-Stage Chapter Draft)
SUMMARY: Draws an important, often blurred distinction between the content of essence (i.e., what lies in the essence of a thing, or what particularly it is to be or do that thing) and what essence facts ground (i.e., what holds in virtue of what lies in the essence of a thing, or what particularly it is to be or do that thing), shows how conflating these things gives rise to the appearance that Essential Grounding—the view that facts of the form [It is essential to x that p] ground corresponding facts of the form [p]—is true, and argues that once these matters are clarified, the apparent attractions of Essential Grounding belong not to it, but to a better, more plausible thesis according to which essence facts ground or otherwise non-causally explain broadly conditional facts despite lacking broadly conditional contents (in normal cases, anyhow); a thesis better secured and illuminated by the view that essence facts just are higher-order identity facts.
Project | 02
"Essence, Grounding, and the Sources of Normativity"
(Late-Stage Chapter Draft)
SUMMARY: Argues (i) that even if the essences of certain act types were normatively charged in the ways John Bengson, Terence Cuneo, and Russ Shafer-Landau propose, facts reporting such essences could not serve as grounds of corresponding normative property instantiations, as Bengson et al. also propose; (ii) that even if the essences of certain normative properties were ground-theoretically charged in the ways Bengson et al. propose, facts reporting such essences could not serve as grounds of explanatorily efficacious normative bridge-laws, as Bengson et al. also propose; and (iii) that especially if the essences of certain normative properties or hybrid properties are as Bengson et al. and Stephanie Leary respectively propose, facts reporting such essences could not serve as grounds of facts about the full grounding of normative facts in corresponding non-normative facts, as Bengson et al. and Leary also respectively propose. The upshot of these results is that metanormative non-naturalism’s most troublesome metaphysical explanatory burdens cannot be discharged by appeal to essence facts (or in certain cases, to essence facts alone)—a result that shifts the pressure of meeting these burdens back onto the non-naturalist’s more classic but more problematic signature posit of brute, explanatorily efficacious normative bridge-laws.
Project | 03
"Higher-Order Metaphysics and The Worldly Correlates of Truths"
SUMMARY: Practitioners of higher-order metaphysics frequently offer various glosses of entities of the types of declarative sentences—e.g., Socrates is human or Snow is white—posit them to fill various theoretical roles, and endorse various claims about their logic. But many of these glosses and theoretical roles tell in favor of a worldly conception of such entities, whereas others, plus the most typical such logical commitments, tell in favor of a non-worldly conception. Taking first-order theories of facts, propositions, and states of affairs as guides, I develop these conceptions before highlighting their significant virtues and serious vices. I then develop a third, hybrid conception that endeavors to achieve the best of the first two conceptions, which nevertheless suffers its own problems for which I sketch the beginnings of a solution. I then consider dualism, which recognizes entities satisfying each of the first two conceptions, and I display some of its problems. Finally, I sketch some strategies available to proponents of the worldly conception for circumventing or substantially mitigating the severity of one of its most troubling vices.
Project | 04
"Essentialist Bare Particularism: A Surprising Solution to a Novel Puzzle for the Grounding-Definition Link"
SUMMARY: An historically popular idea about the broadly Aristotelian conception of essence holds that the essence of Φ is that in virtue of which Φ things are Φ. Ground theorists typically characterize this role ground-theoretically. In many cases, some version of this looks prima facie plausible: If to be a bachelor is in part to be unmarried, for instance, it plausibly follows that for any bachelor, x, x is a bachelor partly in virtue of being unmarried. But something troubling happens when we replace ‘Φ’ with a proper name, such as ‘Socrates’, or a corresponding predicate 'be Socrates'. Pretend Duns Scotus’s conception of individual natures is correct, and that to be Socrates, say, is to be this rational animal (where ‘this’ expresses a Scotistic haecceity). We are led by the foregoing to suppose that the fact that Socrates is Socrates is grounded in the fact that Socrates is this rational animal. But this looks bizarre: How could Socrates appear at an earlier stage of the grounding chain than the fact that Socrates is Socrates? This project develops this puzzle and advances a surprising solution to it: a novel version of the doctrine of bare particulars.
Project | 05
"On the Depth of God's Perfection"
SUMMARY: Utilizes recent work on grounding and building firstly to clarify and secondly to criticize a recently popular theistic proposal (tracing back to Joshua Rasmussen) to the effect that (i) God is fundamentally perfect, and (ii) God’s being perfect explains God’s possession of the various perfections.