I’m really proud of what’s happening at Mason. There’s a lot to celebrate as we begin the new academic year: a strong Academic Program Review and seven-year roadmap, new faculty hiring, an ambitious MA redesign, new directions for PPE, a new chapter for the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, and plenty more.
I’m enormously grateful to the faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends who make the department what it is. Here’s to another year of questions worth asking.
I’m pleased to share that I’ve been appointed Chair of the Department of Philosophy at George Mason University. I’m looking forward to working with colleagues and students to support the department and help shape its next chapter.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/25152459241268220
I was promoted to Associate Professor of Philosophy, effective August 25, 2024.
A Guide to Thought Experiments in Epistemology, available now in Contemporary Debates v 3
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a guide for conducting thought experiments in epistemology effectively. The guide raises several considerations for best practices when using this research method. Several weaknesses in the way thought experiments are conducted are also identified and several suggestions are reviewed for how to improve them. Training in these research techniques promotes more productive scholarship in epistemology, saves time and resources wasted on less efficient approaches, and reduces the risk that researchers are fooling themselves when they use thought experiments in philosophy.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard Feynman
I think that it would be a good idea for researchers to believe that the claims they publish are right, and that this should be the norm for academic publishing. That’s what I believe + published here: https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/3117/
Should we worry about it? Yes. We should.
New paper at Philosophy and the Mind Sciences explains why: https://philosophymindscience.org/index.php/phimisci/article/view/9193
New paper in Philosophical Psychology underlies a lot of my thinking over the years on the subject of moral responsibility and may explain the persistence of many philosophical debates.
This paper takes a look at the Toxin Puzzle and questions whether it really is a challenge to pure voluntarism or supports a reasons constraint on intentions.
