I'm an Associate Professor of philosophy at the Virginia Military Institute.
I specialize in ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and in philosophy and literature.
I am particularly interested in figurative thought and language, and in the role these play in moral thinking.
I specialize in ethics, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and in philosophy and literature.
I am particularly interested in figurative thought and language, and in the role these play in moral thinking.
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Synopsis of Research
I study issues in the philosophy of mind, language, and ethics, predominantly from an analytic philosophy perspective. In the history of philosophy, I published articles on Kant, Elizabeth Anscombe, Wittgenstein, and Cora Diamond.
One focus of my research is a family of experiences which we may call “transformative”—e.g. experiences of the uncanny, of wonder, ‘a-ha!’ moments, and aspect-shifts. Often treated as marginal, my contention is that understanding these phenomena may throw light on central issues in the philosophy of perception, mathematics, ethics, metaphilosophy, and more. This, for one thing, since such experiences reveal that the mind’s relation to the world may not be fixed, or even guaranteed. How our minds make contact with the world, if at all—what forms of judgment, in Kant’s sense, we may employ, what attitude we may adopt—is not always settled or secured.
I approach the matter centrally via a study the phenomena of aspect-perception—as when we suddenly see Robert Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, , as a duck, when previously we only saw it as a rabbit. My main contention is that aspect-perception typically involves bringing a concept to an object apart from any routine of conceptualization. That is, when we thus bring a concept to an object we are not treating the object as routinely conceptualized in this way, but are only letting ourselves experience—palpably—what it would be like to conceptualize the object in this way. In this sense, aspect-seeing involves a special kind of mind-work, a distinct “form of judgment.”
Aspect-perception and the related matters I mentioned stand at the crossroad of several philosophical issues, which allows me to study these phenomena from a variety of perspectives. These phenomena have a central place in the philosophy of perception, and the philosophy of language insofar as questions about conceptualization are at stake. They are also important to the philosophy of psychology and the philosophy of the social sciences more broadly, inasmuch as difficulties conceptualizing the mind and social phenomena are involved. Mathematical insights also often involve aspect shifts, as does moral thinking. The study of these phenomena and experiecnes is also central to aesthetics, and the study of metaphors. And finally, understanding these phenomena is also tied to metaphilosophy and to the understanding of philosophical methodology. The study of these phenomena is thus a little explored gateway to philosophy broadly.
I have published several papers about aspect-perception in Metaphilosophy, the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, the Nordic Wittgenstein Review, and Essays in Philosophy. A paper of mine that examines the connection between aspect-seeing and conceptualization was recently published in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. A paper of mine that ties Wittgenstein’s moral thought to his discussion of aspects was recently published in Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, a volume I co-edited with Prof. Edmund Dain.
Another related focus of my work is moral philosophy. I have developed a reading of Kant’s conception of self-legislation, alternative to both mainstream constructivist and realist readings. Prominent constructivist interpreters, like Christine Korsgaard, align Kant’s practical philosophy with Aristotle’s and take the notion of self-legislation to denote a life-long project of determining the organizing principle of our practical life and constituting our own agency. Realist readings of Kant’s practical philosophy tend to identify the source of normativity as external to us. In opposition to both, I argue that describing the sources of moral normativity in Kant requires an irreducible metaphorical language—the language that Kant employs when he describes us as internally split into law-givers and law-receivers: we lay down the law on ourselves, obey it or fail to, and then put ourselves on trial. I discuss this in “A Splitting Mind-Ache: Anscombean Challenge to Kantian Self-Legislation” (in The Journal of philosophical Research), and in “Kant’s Non-Aristotelian Conception of Morality,” (in Southwest Philosophy Review). More recently, I have developed a reading of Wittgenstein’s moral thought that stresses his attention to attitudinal changes in moral thought. I do that in “Moral Thought in Wittgenstein: Clarity and Changes of Attitude” (in Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought). On the reading I propose, attitudinal changes are akin to aspect-shifts, and can be triggered by a special use of language—often apparently assertoric—whose point is to prompt a sort of imaginative involvement with someone or something. So, for instance, when we point out that “Prisoners have mothers too,” or that “We are flesh and blood,” we know we are not giving anyone any new information. Still, this language can bring a shift in someone’s attitude, perhaps in ourselves, and get people to look at things anew. An often neglected aspect of moral thinking is thus clarified.
One general implication which emerges from both strands in my research is that ineliminable figurative thinking and uses of language may sometimes be central to the understanding of at least some issues in ethics and in philosophy more broadly. Figurative thinking is not merely suggestive and thought provoking. It may rather be constitutive of some phenomena: Some phenomena allow themselves to be revealed, so to speak, only in figurative thinking and language—only under the pressure of a certain imaginative involvement.