About Me

I am a philosopher at the University of Florida, where I have taught since 1997. You can find my most recent curriculum vitae here. And if you care to know my considered positions on several philosophical issues, you can see my responses to the PhilPapers opinion survey.

While I am not a native Floridian, my family moved to Florida when I was relatively young, so Florida feels like home. I did my BA at (the antediluvian version of) New College of Florida and my PhD at Rutgers University, and I was glad to be able to come back here for the long term. Florida may have quite the reputation for being an odd state, but perhaps that is only appropriate for a philosopher — to live in an odd state.

Areas of Research

Metaphysics, philosophy of mind, physicalism, consciousness, a priori knowledge

For more, see the page on Research and/or my profile page on PhilPeople, which includes links to various publications.

Areas of Teaching Interest

Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of rmind, philosophy of religion, history of analytic philosophy, meta-ethics

I take teaching very seriously and think of it as a very important way in which my career enables me to effect good in the world — by helping students gain key skills in careful, clear thinking about slippery issues. Thinking about philosophical questions requires exercising those skills, but those skills transfer to a wide array of other areas as well. That they really do transfer in this way is confirmed by the data on how well philosophy majors do by various measures, including standardized test scores and salaries; for some of that data, see “Why Philosophy?” A recent significant study also provides statistical evidence for the claim that the study of philosophy really does improve people’s thinking abilities. The abstract reads:

Many philosophers think that doing philosophy cultivates valuable intellectual abilities and dispositions. Indeed this is a premise in a venerable argument for philosophy’s value. Unfortunately, empirical support for this premise has heretofore been lacking. We provide evidence that philosophical study has such effects. Using a large dataset (including records from over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of institutions across the United States), we investigate philosophy students’ performance on verbal and logical reasoning tests, as well as measures of valuable intellectual dispositions. Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. This offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.

You can see a brief write-up here and the full study here.

Undergraduate courses I teach regularly include Metaphysics, Theory of Knowledge, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Mind. By way of graduate courses, I have taught Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, Epistemology, Proseminar, and various research seminars, often on topics related to philosophy of mind or the thesis of physicalism. For information on my current or upcoming courses, see the Current Teaching page.