University of California, San Diego

Faculty Member, Philosophy

About

I was trained in the philosophy of language, but my work focuses mostly on topics in ancient philosophy (particularly Plato), early modern philosophy (particularly Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley), ethics, and constitutional law.  Recently I have been working on a reconstruction and evaluation of Berkeley’s argument for idealism, a paper on will and motivation in seventeenth century British philosophy (focusing on the work of Bramhall, Hobbes, Cudworth, and Locke), a paper on sensible qualities in the seventeenth century (focusing on Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Locke, and Boyle), a paper on Hume's account of pity and malice (and its relation to Hume's account of the passions more generally), a paper on Plato’s definitions of sophistry in the Sophist, and a paper on the moral status of enabling harm.

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