Faculty

I am interested primarily in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, with associated interests in early analytic philosophy and Kant.
My interest in philosophy of logic stems from the conviction that many epistemological questions are at root questions about the nature of intelligent thought, and so can be illuminated by a clearer understanding of the nature of logic and its role in shaping and governing belief.  This is reflected in my dissertation (UC Irvine, 2007) which investigated the link between the ground of logical truth and the status of logic as providing norms for belief.  One way of thinking about logical norms (put roughly) is that we are criticizable for transgressing logical norms for belief regardless of what the world is like. This tends to favor a view of logical truth that locates its ground in necessary features of thought (though not in a psychologistic sense) or representation. I look at two instantiations of this view, in Kant's theoretical philosophy and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and how "necessary features of thought or representation" must be understood if the view is to succeed. In the end I advance a view of logic in which (surprisingly) the formal features of thought are not explanatory of logical truths. Though my most recent efforts were consumed by my dissertation, I have a number of research interests in logic and philosophy of mathematics. In the philosophy of mathematics I am primarily concerned with the nature of mathematical truth and knowledge. One point of entry into these issues is questions about the determinacy or indeterminacy of reference to the structure known as "The natural numbers."
I'm also interested in formal logic generally, but particularly in questions of higher set theory, of the proof theory of arithmetic, and about the nature of quantifiers. I hope to pay more attention to these questions later on down the road. In addition to these, I am interested in a broad range of philosophical questions, in the history of philosophy (analytic, continental, and otherwise) in the period from about 1860-1930, "naturalism" in philosophical method and its opponents, the nature of belief and its relation to content, epistemology generally as well as the epistemology of religious belief, and the development of philosophy of language, logic, mathematics, and science in the early modern period through Kant. .


Writings and Recently Taught Courses

Works in Progress

• "Propositional adequacy, independence, and incommensurability". This is a logic paper I wrote some years ago, extending the notion of expressive adequacy for truth-functional (propositional) logic to infinitary cases.  Currently research into it is on hold, though I hope to return to it in the future.  Please do not cite or quote without permission.

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Current CV

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