My current research focuses on extraordinary answers to ordinary questions about material objects. I'm especially interested in varieties of ontological permissivism and the rich range of puzzles they give rise to. More broadly, I'm interested in the ways that taking weird, radical, or revisionary views seriously can help us better understand the place of ontology in human inquiry. 

Publications

Varieties of Plenitude, Philosophy Compass, 15 (3), 2020. doi: 10.1111/phc3.12654
Material Plenitude is the view that there is an abundance of coincident objects wherever there is any material object. This article explores a few places for puzzlement about plenitude; in particular, how we ought to motivate and formulate the target view. I'll suggest along the way that an investigation of plenitude is not merely of interest in its own right, but can provide valuable insights into abundant ontologies more generally. 

The Barest Flutter of the Smallest Leaf: Understanding Material Plenitude, The Philosophical Review, 128 (2):143-178, 2019. doi: 10.1215/00318108-7374932
According to material plenitude, every material object coincides with an abundance of other material objects that differ in the properties they have essentially and accidentally. Although this kind of plenitude is becoming increasingly popular, it isn't clear how to make sense of the view beyond its slogan form. As I argue, it turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to do so: straightforward attempts are either inconsistent or fail to capture the target idea. Making progress requires us to engage in more delicate metaphysics than we might have expected and, along the way, reveals substantive constraints on the material world. In this article, I argue that any attempt to develop a coherent version of plenitude is subject to two under-appreciated challenges, and I develop a version of plenitude (global plenitude) capable of overcoming both.

Against Conservatism in Metaphysics (with John Hawthorne), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 82: 45-75, 2018. doi: 10.1017/s1358246118000103
In his recent book, Daniel Korman contrasts ontological conservatives with permissivists and eliminativists about ontology. Roughly speaking, conservatives admit the existence of ‘ordinary objects' like trees, dogs, and snowballs, but deny the existence of ‘extraordinary objects', like composites of trees and dogs. Eliminativists, on the other hand, deny many or all ordinary objects, while permissivists accept both ordinary and extraordinary objects. Our aim in this paper is to outline some of our reasons for being drawn to permissivism, as well as some of our misgivings about conservative metaphysics. In the first section, we discuss a tempting epistemic line of argument against conservatism. This isn’t a line of argument we find especially promising. Our most basic complaint against conservatism is not that conservatism has poor epistemic standing even if true, but instead that conservatism is weird. We develop this thought in the second part of the paper. In the final section we discuss some larger methodological issues about the project of ontology.

A Paradox of Matter and Form. Thought, 6:33-42,  2017. doi: 10.1002/tht3.230
In the face of the puzzles of material constitution, some philosophers have been moved to posit a distinction between an object's matter and its form. A familiar difficulty for contemporary hylomorphism is to say which properties are eligible as forms: for example, it seems that it would be intolerably arbitrary to say that being statue shaped is embodied by some material object, but that other complex shape properties aren't. Anti-arbitrariness concerns lead quickly to a plenitudinous ontology. The usual complaint is that the super-abundance of material objects is too extraordinary to accept, but I want to raise a different worry: I argue that the most natural way of developing this picture is already inconsistent. I show that a simple version of plenitudinous hylomorphism is subject to a Russellian argument, but argue that we cannot treat the problem straightforwardly as an instance of Russell's Paradox of Sets.

Selected Works In Progress

Arbitrariness Arguments in Ontology

Radically permissive ontologies like mereological universalism and material plenitude are typically motivated by concerns about arbitrariness or anthropocentrism: it would be objectionably arbitrary, the thought goes, to countenance only those objects that we ordinarily take there to be. But despite the prevalence of this idea, it isn’t at all clear what it is for a theory to be “objectionably arbitrary,” or what follows from a commitment to avoiding arbitrariness in metaphysics. This paper aims to clarify both questions, and examines whether arguments from arbitrariness really are the proper foundations for one or both varieties of ontological permissivism. I argue that these considerations (even when made more precise) are far less successful at motivating radical forms of permissivism than we often take them to be. To do better, permissivists must either supply a much more developed metaphysics of material objects, or a controversial (but tempting) conception of what we’re doing when we do metaphysics.

Thought and Talk in a Generous World (with Alex Sandgren)

The Problem of the Many purports to challenge the platitude that ordinary utterances -- like "the cat is on the mat'" -- are about particular things in the world. How is it that, given how very many cat-like candidates there are, we manage to think and talk about a particular cat? In this paper, we argue that this challenge stems from an under-examined assumption about the relationship between metaphysics and ordinary thought and talk. We propose and explore a novel way of characterizing what it is to think and talk about the world, according to which an abundant ontology poses no obstacle to our ability to talk about particular things. On this proposal, talking about cats does not require selecting one (or more) from the many.

Hybrid Contingentism

I answer a challenge developed most recently in Williamson (2013) that sustaining a prima facie attractive pair of commitments about modal ontology requires either a perverse attitude about the logic of quantification or an unacceptable metaphysics -- or both.  This paper outlines a defense of hybrid contingentism: that it is contingent which individuals there are but not contingent what properties (propositions, etc) there are. Central to the version of hybrid contingentism I’m exploring is recognition of the difference between ‘comprehension principles’ at the higher- and lower- orders. First-order comprehension principles, I argue, can be strong enough to deliver a suitably ‘maximal’ metaphysics of individuals without thereby supporting the rush to necessitism at every order.

Incredible Ontology 

David Lewis suggests that metaphysical theorizing is subject to a “simple maxim of honesty”:  you ought not defend a theory that you can’t yourself believe. On the face of it, this functions like a kind of ‘common sense’ constraint on metaphysics, but gives belief (and, in particular, the beliefs of metaphysicians) a radically different role in theory choice than other more familiar Moorean appeals. In this paper, I explore a three varieties of ‘incredible’ metaphysics, and argue that even this minimal constraint oversteps.

Plenitude, Combinatorialism, and Humility

I raise a problem for the version of plenitude defended in Fairchild (2019), and argue that the plenitude-lover faces a choice point: either endorse a surprising form of modal combinatorialism, or adopt a new form of plenitude. I argue that while -- in the name of ontological humility -- we should do the latter, the former response opens up some cool new ways of thinking about the interaction between material plenitude and the modal mosaic. 

Hylomorphic Change (with Shieva Kleinschmidt)

According to the Temporal Parts account of change, primary bearers of temporary properties are temporal parts of persisting objects, and the persisting objects (in some sense) derive temporary properties from them.  Jeffrey Brower has presented an Aristotelian account of change that has a structure similar to a temporal parts account, but which is friendly to Three-Dimensionalists. On this solution, temporary objects have temporary properties and persisting objects as parts, and persisting objects (in some sense) derive temporary properties from the temporary objects they are successively parts of. We raise a dilemma for this view: either the solution cannot account for facts about how objects change in parts over time, or it requires rejecting the claim that, for any object, if it has a part present at a region, then the object is partly present at the region. We explore how theorists who endorse a hylomorphic view of material objects may be able to reject some common connections between parts and places, but we argue that they will not have plausible grounds to reject the principle about partial location when applied to material objects.

Fuzzy Plenitude

I develop a version of fuzzy plenitude, according to which the world contains not only an abundance of coincident “precise” objects, but also of “fuzzy” objects. I argue that this view is consistent -- and, in particular, doesn’t require vague identity -- and show how the resulting picture provides a more attractive picture of the material world than (modal) material plenitude alone.