about me

I am a philosopher with an interest in formal approaches to traditional philosophical topics, currently with a particular interest in questions about agency and control. I also have interests in epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics.

writings

Publications

• "The Logic of Action and Control" Develops an intensional logic to model the familiar concept of control, with applications in the foundations of decision theory. (journal) (preprint)
• "Argle Victorious" Advances a novel, sophisticated version of Lewis and Lewis' theory of holes-as-linings, immune to standard objections and to a novel counterargument developed in the paper. (journal) (preprint)
• "Explanation and Nowness" Argues that A-theorists about time have difficulty explaining why the present, of all times, enjoys a special privileged position. (journal)

Thesis

• Control and Its Limits Develops a formal logic of control, using it as a framework to address problems in decision theory, ethics, and the logic of action. (link)

Works in Progress

• "Metatheory for Bacon's Logic of Vagueness" Proves metalogical results for a logic of vagueness suggested in Andrew Bacon's Vagueness and Thought. (under review)
• "Reconciling the Control Principle with Broad Responsibility" Argues that standard approaches to so-called "moral luck" bypass an important class of positions that reconcile intuitions and principles widely taken to be inconsistent. (email for draft)
• "A Country of Geniuses in a Data Centre" Argues that transcendental/Kantian resonses to scepticism plus standard "good cases" for a technological singularity entail mass human mindlessness. (rough draft)

curriculum vitae

My CV is available here.

fun & games

Since January of 2025, I have cultivated an amateur interest in group theory. The following are some small hobby projects related to that interest, a series of small browser games designed to illustrate some anomalous objects in the theory of finite groups. While they draw on relatively advanced mathematical concepts, they require no fluency with higher mathematics and are meant to help convey to outsiders what can be so captivating about the subject.

• "Permutation City Planning" Implements the famous exceptional outer automorphism of the symmetry group on six elements. (link)
• "Mat's Aggressive Matrices" A "fan continuation" of Raven's Progressive Matrices, an old visual pattern-based intelligence test, with a sequence of much more sophisticated patterns. (link)
• "Ralts to the Rescue!" A Pokémon-themed puzzle based on Conway's extension of the smaller Mathieu groups to the Mathieu groupoid M₁₃. (link)