About

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Michigan as an LSA Collegiate Fellow, I completed my PhD at the University of Southern California and my BA at UNC Chapel Hill.  In 2021-22, I was the Harrington Faculty Research Fellow in Philosophy at UT Austin.
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​I work primarily in metaphysics, with interests in related areas of philosophical logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. Most of my research concerns the value of abundance. I'm particularly interested in varieties of ontological permissivism: hypotheses about what exists that are radically or “maximally” inclusive, and so say that the world contains vastly more (and much stranger) entities than we ordinarily recognize. 

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Research

For full abstracts and selected works in progress, check out my Research page.

• Symmetry and Hybrid Contingentism. in Higher-Order Metaphysics (OUP), ed. Peter Fritz and Nicholas K. Jones, 2024. (preprint)
• Plenitude, Coincidence, and Humility. Philosophical Perspectives, 2022. doi: 10.1111/phpe.12161
• Arbitrariness and the Long Road to Permissivism. Noûs, 2022. doi: 10.1111/nous.12376 
• Varieties of Plenitude. Philosophy Compass, 15 (3), 2020. doi: 10.1111/phc3.12654 
• The Barest Flutter of the Smallest Leaf: Understanding Material Plenitude. The Philosophical Review, 128 (2):143-178, 2019. doi: 10.1215/00318108-7374932  (selected for The Philosopher's Annual)
• Against Conservatism in Metaphysics (with John Hawthorne).  Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 82: 45-75, 2018. doi: 10.1017/s1358246118000103 
• A Paradox of Matter and Form. Thought, 6:33-42,  2017. doi: 10.1002/tht3.230

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Teaching

See my Teaching page for information about the courses I teach, as well as my UM Student Resources  page, where I've compiled information about student support resources available at the University of Michigan. 

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CV (Sept 2024)