I received my PhD in 2014 from Rutgers University. Ernest Sosa was my advisor. My dissertation was entitled On the Normativity of Epistemic Rationality. It sought to explain why we should care about being epistemically rational by appealing to the idea that it constitutes having respect for truth. From 2014 to early 2015, I was a post-doctoral lecturer in the Normativity: Epistemic and Practical project at the University of Southampton. Since early 2015, I have been permanent lecturer at Southampton.
Much of my research combines my interests in epistemology and ethics, and is perhaps best described as work in the ethics of belief. I'm…
I received my PhD in 2014 from Rutgers University. Ernest Sosa was my advisor. My dissertation was entitled On the Normativity of Epistemic Rationality. It sought to explain why we should care about being epistemically rational by appealing to the idea that it constitutes having respect for truth. From 2014 to early 2015, I was a post-doctoral lecturer in the Normativity: Epistemic and Practical project at the University of Southampton. Since early 2015, I have been permanent lecturer at Southampton.
Much of my research combines my interests in epistemology and ethics, and is perhaps best described as work in the ethics of belief. I'm currently working on developing the first explicit and systematic non-consequentialist ethics of belief, Epistemic Kantianism, which rests on a requirement of respect for truth (a notion also centrally invoked in three of my publications). I'm also drafting funding bids for a wider project on respect for truth (more of which the world sorely needs).
I also, however, think that epistemology in the narrow sense (i.e., the theory of knowledge) is non-normative, and is really a branch of the philosophy of mind. I defend this view in a recent publication. In work in progress, I'm developing a descendant of the first account of knowledge considered in Western philosophy and also defended by figures in classical Indian philosophy and the forgotten British epistemologist Helen Wodehouse in her neglected book The Presentation of Reality: namely, the view that knowledge is that general factive mental state which, when occurrent, constitutes a presentation of a fact (where presentations are quasi-perceptual states, partly vindicating Theaetetus's thought that 'knowledge is nothing but perception', though where the perception at issue is intellectual rather than sensory, in line with Plato's view in the Republic).
