Hi!
I am an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher with the Phlox Research Group at the University of Vienna and before that a PhD student at Princeton University. You can find my CV here.
My research is mainly in metaphysics and social philosophy. I am particularly interested in developing a metaphysical interpretation of existential quantification. My hunch is that higher-order quantification is both metaphysically indispensable and ontologically innocent and my current research tries to make sense of this idea. In related work, I defend the possibility of quantifying over absolutely everything and suggest that while it might be true that there is a smallest prime, it needn’t follow that numbers belong in our ontology.
My work in social philosophy also focuses on ontological questions, particularly about gender. I defend a realist account of gender, according to which there are socio-metaphysical facts about an individual’s gender. I am particularly interested in the ways that the tools and devices of contemporary analytic metaphysics can be fruitfully applied to social questions.
Recently, I have also developed interests in the theoretical virtues, particularly in parsimony, which is the focus of much of my current research. In particular, I have been exploring the viability of an approach that balances the virtues of parametric accounts of parsimony, with those of the quantificational accounts that are more familiar in metaphysical contexts.
