My official research area is the philosophy of mind, but I am interested in virtually all the perennial problems of philosophy, as well as the history of tackling them. Currently I am focused on three main projects. The first concerns the value of consciousness: what epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic value might our conscious experience have, and why? The second concerns the nature of moral awareness: are the most foundational forms of moral awareness emotional, rational, both, or neither - and what difference does that make to our grasp of right and wrong? My third main project is in fundamental ontology: what ontological categories do the basic units of reality - "the alphabet of being" - belong to, and how can we tell?
Books
Brentano's Philosophical System. OUP 2018.
The Varieties of Consciousness. OUP 2015.
The Sources of Intentionality. OUP 2011.
Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory. OUP 2009.
Selected Articles
What Is Knowledge by Acquaintance? Noûs forthcoming.
(With Takuya Niikawa.) The Sublime of Consciousness. British Journal of Aesthetics 2025.
Knowledge-by-Acquaintance First. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2024.
(With Anna Giustina.) Inner Awareness: The Argument from Attention. Philosophical Studies 2024.
Beatrice Edgell's Myth of the Given. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2024.
The Structure of Phenomenal Justification. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2023.
A Fitting-Attitude Approach to Aesthetic Value? British Journal of Aesthetics 2023.
Egalitarian vs. Elitist Plenitude. Philosophical Studies 2022.
Moral Judgment and the Content-Attitude Distinction. Philosophical Studies 2022.
The Concreteness of Objects. Synthese 2021.
Beyond the Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness 2020.
The Value of Consciousness. Analysis 2019.
The Intentional Structure of Moods. Philosophers’ Imprint 2019.
Brentano's Dual-Framing Theory of Consciousness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2018.
Cognitivism About Emotion and the Alleged Hyperopacity of Emotional Content. Philosophical Studies 2016.
Thought and Thing. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2015.
Experiencing the Present. Analysis 2015.