Philosophy

I received my PhD in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in May 2021. I worked on the philosophy of mind and perception and the philosophy of cognitive science.

My dissertation is on the perception of events, like songs, thunderstorms, and conversations. Event perception has been largely unexplored in philosophy, especially relative to object perception, but a growing body of evidence from cognitive psychology suggests that we perceive events in addition to objects. I lay out a set of goals and methods for a fruitful philosophical investigation of event perception, then pursue that investigation. On the basis of the empirical work, and with attention to the unique philosophical problems posed by event perception, I argue that we perceive events. I furthermore suggest that event representations are over and above object and property representations, and that we perceptually attribute temporal boundness uniquely to events. My dissertation was supervised by Casey O'Callaghan (advisor), Jeff Zacks (psychology), John Heil, Ron Mallon, and Becko Copenhaver. (PDF) (Open Scholarship)

In 2019, I published an article called "The Causal Situationist Account of Constitutive Relevance" in the philosophy of science journal, Synthese. The topic of constitutive relevance concerns how scientists go about identifying the components of neural mechanisms, to find, e.g., which parts of the brain are responsible for some cognitive function. I show that the extant accounts of constitutive relevance fail to satisfy three popular desiderata of such an account, and I offer an account that satisfies all three. The causal situationist account, as I call it, situates a component as being on the causal chain between a mechanism's input and output. (PDF) (DOI)

From Spring 2018 through Fall 2019, I was an organizer of the WashU Mind and Perception Group. We hosted our own philosophy of mind speaker series on Zoom, bringing in anywhere between five and nine speakers per semester. We also organized a two-day workshop on cognitive ontology with nine esteemed philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists who work on the topic.

From Fall 2016 through Spring 2019, I presented my research in the philosophy of mind/perception and the philosophy of cognitive science/psychology at numerous conferences across the US and Europe.

I taught three undergraduate courses at University College at WashU. I taught Introduction to Logic in Summer 2017, for which I developed my own textbook (PDF), based on an open source logic textbook. I also taught Biomedical Ethics in person in Summer 2019, then online in Fall 2019.

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