Papers
I have mixed feelings about putting my unpublished work online, but my feelings are much less mixed about sharing it with colleagues. I'm happy to share and even more happy to discuss, so just email.
In progress/unpublished
Stuff that I have worked on recently tends to be closer to the top of the page.
- 'Suárez on the Priority of Final Causation'. A number of recent commentators have suggested that Suárez gives priority to efficient causation or even that he reduces final causation to efficient causation. In this paper I push against such interpretations and show that on Suárez's picture of causation, efficient causes depend on final causes for their causality. This is not quite enough to get the priority of final causation since Suárez also thinks that final causes depend on efficient causes for their causality. There are texts, however, that indicate that Suárez remains committed to the priority of final causation. It is more difficult, however, to see just what that priority claim amounts to on his picture. It is clear, however, that attributing a priority of efficient causation thesis to Suárez is misleading.
- 'Leibniz and Some Predecessors on the Possibility of Two-Subject Accidents'. Leibniz famously refuses to countenance accidents that have one leg in one subject and another leg in another subject. Hence, he insists that paternity in David is one relation, filiation in Solomon another, and both only have one subject. In all this, Leibniz is simply following what is more or less a consensus among medieval philosophers. But why deny the possibility of two-subject accidents? Leibniz and most medieval philosophers say very little about why two-subject accidents are impossible, but in this paper I explore what their reasons might have been. I suggest one account of individuation that would come naturally to an Aristotelian would lend support to the denial of two-subject accidents. I also show, however, that many philosophers, and perhaps Leibniz, accept an alternative account of individuation that seems to leave open the possibility of two-subject accidents.
- 'Suárez on Reductionism about Categorical Relations'. Suárez distinguishes between categorical, transcendental, and conceptual relations. In this paper, I look at his account of the first kind. Suárez thinks that categorical relations are real and that they form a distinct category of being, but he is also a reductionist about them. One white thing's similarity to another white thing, for example, can be reduced to the two things and their whitenesses.
- `Francisco Suárez on Acting for the Sake of the Ultimate End'. My dissertation. You can see the abstract here and the preface (something of a historical introduction to Suárez) here.
- 'Interpretative Intention in Suárez'. Suárez distinguishes between four kinds of intention is several contexts: actual, virtual, habitual, and interpretative. Unfortunately for readers, it looks like he presents three incompatible accounts of what interpretative intention is. In this paper I look at two of those accounts and explain what the problem is.
- 'Termini and Final Causes'. As it stands, this paper has too much going on it. I look at Suárez and Descartes on final causation, and, as if that weren't enough, throw in some Aquinas and Boyle as well. Among other things, I argue that Suárez has a more precise notion in mind when he talks about final causation than the notion we have in mind when we talk about teleology. This matters for interpreting Descartes, since, I argue, this more precise notion is the one he inherits. At the end of the day, I think Descartes leaves far more room for teleology than is commonly thought.
- 'Early Modern Scotists and Eudaimonism'. Scotus's account of the two affections of the will (the affectio commodi and the affectio iustitiae have received a lot of recent scholarly attention, in good part because this is often seen as a place where Scotus breaks from the eudaimonist tradition. Curiously, however, the early modern followers of Scotus seem largely to ignore this part of Scotus.
Published/forthcoming
- 'Free and Rational: Suárez on the Will', Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, forthcoming. A look at Suárez's account of the human will. His position can be understood as a balancing act between desiring to attribute libertarian freedom to agents and desiring to maintain the will’s status as a rational appetite. Hence, he rejects an intellectualism that says that choices are necessitated by the intellect's judgements (since he does not think that the judgements themselves can be directly free), but affirms that only what is judged good can be chosen.
- 'Swiss Anabaptists and the Miraculous', Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (2006): 207–28. A paper based on historical research that I did as an undergraduate. I argue that the early Swiss Anabaptists made remarkably few appeals to miracles and suggest some reasons why. Will I ever be able to write about laughing decapitated heads in a philosophy paper?
