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Chair of the Department of Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy, and Member of the Cognitive Sciences Program. University of Illinois-Chicago, B. A., M. A.; Cornell University M.A., Ph.D., 1992. My primary areas of research are metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion, with secondary interests in epistemology and in select topics in medieval and 17th Century philosophy. You can download a number of my articles through my personal website. In metaphysics, I have written extensively on the problem of giving a coherent and plausible account of the metaphysical conditions on free will, and wrote a book on that topic, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Oxford, 2000. The number of philosophers who thought this to be the final word on the matter dropped from 1 to 0 when I wrote "Freedom With a Human Face," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2005. Currently, I am working on the challenge to the belief in human autonomy from neuroscience and social and clinical psychology. I have long been working out views concerning properties, causation, the ontology of composite objects and their properties, truthmakers, essence, and modality. Some of these issues are explored in my writings on free will, and I touch on them to varying degrees in the first part of a just published book, Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency, Blackwell, 2008. In that specialized sub-area of metaphysics known as philosophy of mind, I am concerned with reductionist vs. emergentist views of the mental and the relationship of consciousness and intentionality. I am currently trying to make sense out of an emergentist, property dualist view of conscious animals such as ourselves, with efforts along these lines in "Emergent Individuals" (Philosophical Quarterly, 2003), "The Metaphysics of Emergence" (Noûs, 2005), and “The Argument from Consciousness Revisited” (Oxford Press volume, forthcoming), all co-authored with former students. I am also currently co-editing two volumes of new work on this topic, both of which engage the sciences, and one of which is heavily inter-disciplinary. Finally, in the philosophy of religion, I focus on the metaphysics of theism (especially God's relationship to time, concurrence in 'secondary' causation, and necessary existence), the problem of evil, the cosmological argument from contingency, and the 'fine-tuning' design argument, many of which come up in the second part of the forthcoming book mentioned above, in addition to several articles. I also think about the epistemology of religious belief, and lately I have been reviewing the very recent work on religious belief in evolutionary psychology. I regularly teach graduate courses and supervise dissertations in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, and occasionally in epistemology and philosophy of religion. I teach advanced undergraduate courses in these areas and in medieval and early modern philosophy. Four years ago, in the absence of a controlling authority, I declared myself to be Philo-Pong Grand Champion, or the world's leading table tennis player among properly credentialed philosophers. I have since been receiving (though also largely evading) challenges to my title. |
Department of Philosophy,
Indiana University,
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