I am a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. I take an empirically informed approach to issues in the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind – e.g., the representation of spatial properties, the transparency/diaphanousness of experience, intentionalism, and mental content.
Here are some questions on which I am now working: What does it take for a visual experience to represent an object’s three dimensional shape? What does it mean to say that perceptual experience is necessarily perspectival? Under what conditions is perceptual experience self-locating? What, exactly, does it mean to say that experience is transparent? Are there different ways of being transparent or different degrees of transparency? Can we get a fruitful explication of the notion(s) of transparency that will help adjudicate some of the disputes in which that thesis is invoked (e.g., disjunctivism v. intentionalism)? Assuming that there are different sorts/degrees of transparency, what (if anything) does a characterization of an experience’s transparency profile tell us about the contents of that experience? What sorts of contents can we attribute to experiences in isolated perceptual modalities and what contents can we attribute to multi-modal experiences; what is the relation between the two? (Which of these questions will be addressed in the dissertation is still a somewhat open question.)
I am also interested in philosophy of language, particularly with respect to the relation between semantic content and mental content and to pluralistic views about the semantic contents of utterances.
I have side interests in the philosophy of art (the ontology of musical and conceptual works, pre-institutional evaluative standards) and the history of philosophy (early modern, especially Hobbes and Locke).
I am also a composer. Click here for more on my work in music.
Here are some questions on which I am now working: What does it take for a visual experience to represent an object’s three dimensional shape? What does it mean to say that perceptual experience is necessarily perspectival? Under what conditions is perceptual experience self-locating? What, exactly, does it mean to say that experience is transparent? Are there different ways of being transparent or different degrees of transparency? Can we get a fruitful explication of the notion(s) of transparency that will help adjudicate some of the disputes in which that thesis is invoked (e.g., disjunctivism v. intentionalism)? Assuming that there are different sorts/degrees of transparency, what (if anything) does a characterization of an experience’s transparency profile tell us about the contents of that experience? What sorts of contents can we attribute to experiences in isolated perceptual modalities and what contents can we attribute to multi-modal experiences; what is the relation between the two? (Which of these questions will be addressed in the dissertation is still a somewhat open question.)
I am also interested in philosophy of language, particularly with respect to the relation between semantic content and mental content and to pluralistic views about the semantic contents of utterances.
I have side interests in the philosophy of art (the ontology of musical and conceptual works, pre-institutional evaluative standards) and the history of philosophy (early modern, especially Hobbes and Locke).
I am also a composer. Click here for more on my work in music.
