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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 [link].
In metaphysics, I wrote a number of articles on the problem of understanding just what free will could possibly be, culminating in a book, The Metaphysics of Free Will [italics], 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. And, despite my best intentions, I continue to get pulled into writing on this topic. Currently, I am at work on the challenges to belief in human freedom and moral responsibility that come from neuroscience and social and clinical psychology.
The topic of free will is a nice gateway into thinking about a number of other issues in metaphysics. So, all along, I have also 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 [italics], Blackwell, 2008. I expect to write on several of these issues for some time to come.
In that 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 a number of articles co-authored with former and current students.
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, some of which come up in the second part of the new book mentioned above, in addition to several articles.
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.
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Department of Philosophy,
Indiana University,
1033 E. Third St.,
Sycamore Hall 026,
Bloomington, IN 47405-7005,
U.S.A.
Phone: +1 (812) 855-9503,
Fax: +1 (812) 855-3777
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