About Me |
Areas of Specialization: Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Education Areas of Competence: Kantian Philosophy, Post-Kantian Philosophy, Kierkegaard My research centers around know-how, learning, and education. I have argued that the intelligent, flexible, and open-ended character of know-how is best captured in terms of self-regulation, where a self-regulator is someone who is ready to make adjustments in response to success and failure. I’ve developed this position by drawing on historical sources (see “Self-Regulation and Knowledge How”) current empirical and philosophical perspectives on animal minds (see “Intellectualizing Know How”), traditional methods of analytic epistemology (see “Knowing How to Know That”) and by relying on neuro-computational models of learning (“Know-How and Why Self-Regulation Will Not Go Away”). My other publications address further topics (including social echo chambers, epistemic injustice, and intellectual autonomy) by relating them to themes of learning and education as well.
I’m currently absorbed in three writing projects that take the above themes in some surprising new directions. The first is a manuscript developing a epistemological view out of the pseudonymous authorship of Søren Kierkegaard. I do not attempt to bring unity to the scattered epistemological views found within Kierkegaard’s work or develop any specific interpretive claim. The goal is not a traditional essay in Kierkegaard scholarship. My approach can be loosely compared to recent virtue-based approaches to knowledge which take inspiration from Aristotle’s practical philosophy rather than his theory of knowledge. It is an attempt to transpose Kierkegaard’s view of life, which focuses largely on ethics and religion, into an epistemic key. To that end, I develop an account of “lived epistemologies” and explore the epistemological dimensions of Kierkegaard’s spheres of existence in terms of objectivity, bullshit, skepticism, irony, honest commitment, humor, and faith. Along the way I uncover the central Kierkegaardian insight that moral and epistemic development occurs through collisions—dramatic conflicts in one’s life which compel one to deeper practices of “inward appropriation”. The latter is, in ordinary terms, a matter of earnestly working the problem of how to live out for oneself. To do so, for Kierkegaard, is not principally a matter of acquiring propositional knowledge, e.g., knowledge about what constitutes good ethical or epistemic practice, but a matter of acquiring know-how. The book brings together continental and analytic research traditions and capitalizes on the growing interest in post-Kantian thought within analytic philosophy. The second is a paper on the role of conscious thought in expert performance. The received noncognitivist view, according to which experts don’t think while performing, has come under sustained attack by both philosophers and cognitive scientists within the last decade. While I agree that experts do in fact think, I argue that there is something worth recovering from the noncognitvist view. What I seek to recover is an ideal of expert performance along three dimensions: (1) the experiential dimension (2) the aesthetic dimension and (3) the performative dimension. These dimensions can come apart, but they come together as fleeting moments of feeling, beauty, and total responsiveness. They are the moments that motivate the performer and inspire an audience. The paper, therefore, stands at the intersection of cognitive science, aesthetics, and philosophical reflections on the good life. The third paper is on film and the Romantic distinction between allegory and symbol. I focus on the films of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and argue that the unique function of slow cinema is the presentation of the Romantic symbol. The paper stands at the intersection of aesthetics, film theory, historical philosophy, and epistemology. With any project, I tend to draw on diverse philosophical traditions, cut through background assumptions and verbal differences, and uncover conceptual overlaps and novel insights. |