Edited Volume

      Perspectives in Metaphysics: An Introductory Coursebook
                              Routledge (under contract)
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Perspectives in Metaphysics is a uniquely inclusive introduction to metaphysics co-authored by 14 leading and emerging scholars in the field. It covers traditional metaphysical problems like personal identity, free will, and time alongside neglected topics such as the metaphysics of gender, social construction, and Buddhist metaphysics. Students using this text will encounter metaphysics as an engaging field of study that is relevant to their daily lives.

articles

2025      "Ordinary Objects" with Daniel Z. Korman
             Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.

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2023      "Genealogical Defeat and Ontological Sparsity"
              Midwest Studies in Philosophy (47): 1--23.

When and why does awareness of a belief's genealogy render it irrational to continue holding that belief? According to explanationism, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to an epistemic defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to the relevant worldly facts. I argue that an influential recent version of explanationism, due to Korman and Locke, incorrectly implies that it is not rationally permissible to adopt a “sparse” ontology of worldly facts or states of affairs. I then propose a new explanationist account of genealogical defeat capable of accommodating rational belief in ontological sparsity. According to my account, awareness of a belief’s genealogy gives rise to a defeater when and because it reveals that the belief is not explanatorily connected to its truthmaker.

PhilPapers              Article

2023           "Against Purity" 
                 Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy​ ​(9)

​A fundamental fact is “pure” just in case it has no grounded entities—ex. Tokyo, President Biden, the River Nile, {Socrates}, etc.—among its constituents. Purity says that every fundamental fact is pure. I argue that Purity is false. My argument begins with a familiar conditional: if Purity is true, then there are no fundamental “grounding facts” or facts about what grounds what. This conditional, despite being widely accepted by Purity's defenders, is the first step toward Purity's undoing. For, if every grounding fact has a ground, then some grounded entities have “groundmates” or distinct grounded entities that share their full grounds. But, if there are groundmates, then Purity is false. So Purity leads to a contradiction. Therefore, it is false. As we shall see, my argument against Purity also gives us a powerful reason to think that some grounding facts are fundamental.
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PhilPapers              Article

2021          "Grounding and the Myth of Ontological Innocence"
​                Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99 (2): 303--318.

​According to the Ontological Innocence Thesis (OIT), grounded entities are ontologically innocent relative to their full grounds. I argue that OIT entails a contradiction, and therefore must be discarded. My argument turns on the notion of “groundmates,” two or more numerically distinct entities that share at least one of their full grounds. I argue that, if OIT is true, then it is both the case that there are groundmates and that there are no groundmates. Therefore, so I conclude, OIT is false. Moreover, once we have seen why OIT is false, only three heterodox views about reality's structure remain. So this paper’s second conclusion is that, even after we have discarded OIT, we are in for an additional surprise.

PhilPapers​           Article

2020        "Debunking Arguments and Metaphysical Laws"
                 Philosophical Studies ​177 (7): 1829--1855.

​I argue that one’s views about which metaphysical laws obtain—including laws about what is identical with what, about what is reducible to what, and about what grounds what—can be used to deflect or neutralize the threat posed by a debunking explanation. I use a well-known debunking argument in the metaphysics of material objects as a case study. Then, after defending the proposed strategy from the charge of question-begging, I close by showing how the proposed strategy can be used by certain moral realists to resist the evolutionary debunking arguments.

PhilPapers             Article

BOOK CHAPTER

                        "Parts and Wholes"
                        Perspectives in Metaphysics (Routledge)
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A student-friendly introduction to the metaphysics of parts and wholes, focused on revisionary approaches.

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