Research

Current research projects

• “Grounds for a Free Lunch.”
  • Defense of the thesis that full grounds imply a “free lunch” status; more precisely, if the fact that P is fully grounded by a collection G of facts, then the fact that P is nothing over and above the facts in G.
• Physicalism, Apriority, and Consciousness.
  • Book manuscript in (slow) progress defending a kind of a priori physicalism in a systematic fashion, with attention to phenomenal consciousness as the big troublemaker for physicalism and how an a priori link to such can plausibly be established.
• “Making Sense of ‘Naturalism’.”
  • Advances a diagnosis of how ‘naturalism’ in the metaphysical sense is best understood, discerning a fundamental unity among many seemingly disparate formulations and using this to offer advice for future invocations of the term.

Recent and upcoming publications

• Review of Ross Cameron (2022) Chains of Being: Infinite Regress, Circularity, and Metaphysical Explanation. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2024.2384912
• “Dual Carving and Minimal Rationalism.” Analytic Philosophy 62: 223-234. August 2021.
• “Full and Partial Grounding.” Co-authored with Kelly Trogdon. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (2): 252-270. Summer 2021.
• “Physicalism UnBlocked.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (7): 890-904. October 2020.
• “Physicality for Physicalists.” Topoi 37 (3): 457-472. September 2018. Special issue “The Character of Physicalism” edited by Andreas Elpidorou.
• “Platonistic Physicalism without Tears.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (9-10): 72-90. 2017. Part of a collection of papers responding to Susan Schneider’s “Does the Mathematical Nature of Physics Undermine Physicalism?”
• “Chudnoff on our Awareness of Abstract Objects.” Florida Philosophical Review 16 (1): 105-116. Winter 2016.
• “A Simple Theory of Intrinsicality.” In Robert M. Francescotti, ed., Companion to Intrinsic Properties. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2014. Pages 111-138.

Recent and upcoming presentations

• “The Near Miss Modal Ontological Argument for Atheism.” Co-authored with Micah Edvension.
  • March 26, 2026. Society for Philosophy of Religion. San Antonio, Texas.
  • February 6, 2026. Florida Philosophical Association. Ybor City, Florida.
• Comments on Evan Welchance’s “Consciousness and Composition.”
  • January 7, 2026, Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association. Baltimore, Maryland.
• Comments on Evan Welchance’s “The Problem of Referential Adicity for Easy Ontology.”
  • January 8, 2025. Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association. New York, New York.
• Comments on Torrance Fung’s “Naive Realism and Color Primitivism.”
  • January 15, 2024. Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association. New York, New York.
• Comments on Ryan Miller’s “Artifacts: Ontology as Easy as it Gets.”
  • January 6, 2023. Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association. Montreal, Canada.
• “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: What Matters in Disputes over Multiple Realization.”
  • Part of an invited symposium “Multiple Realization in Fact and Theory.” February 24, 2022. Central Division, American Philosophical Association. Chicago, IL.
• Comments on Daniel Giberman and David Kovacs, “Property Dualism (not?) for Property Nominalists.”
  • February 26, 2020. Central Division, American Philosophical Association. Chicago, IL.
• “Grounds for a Free Lunch.”
  • November 1, 2019. Florida Philosophical Association. Gainesville, FL.
• “Goff’s Insufficiently Minimal Minimal Rationalism.” November 2, 2018.
  • Florida Philosophical Association. Pensacola, FL.
• “Metaphysics and A Priori Vindication.”
  • May 10, 2018. Invited talk at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz, CA.