My book, Aristotle on Accidental Causation, is currently in production with Cambridge University Press. Links to published or forthcoming papers are listed below.

Broadly, my research interests are centered on ancient and medieval philosophers. These interests are purely philosophical:  I think these philosophers make rigorous, elegant arguments; draw useful distinctions; and discuss important concepts. Much of their work is, I think, useful to philosophers even today.

Works in Print or Forthcoming:

A New Puzzle About Aristotelian Accidents

Aristotle gives a surprisingly broad menu of examples of something being accidental to something else. But the breadth of these examples seems to threaten a basic feature of accidentality, namely its asymmetry. ‘Accident’ has different senses, and one might think that that fact offers a way out, but some examples resist such an understanding. The best way forward, I argue, is to take accidentality to be contextual: relative to some context or condition, something might be accidental to something else; relative to another context or condition, the latter might be accidental to the former.

The Texture of Aristotle’s Ontology

The place of accidental unities in Aristotle’s ontology is often understood in terms of our concept of identity, with such unities held to be either identical with substances or not. I argue that this approach is misleading: Aristotle characterizes how they stand to one another using a different relation altogether, namely sameness. Once we take him at his word, a philosophically satisfying middle-path emerges.

Aristotle on How Efficient Causation Works

Aristotle’s critique of Platonic theories of efficient causation reveal a feature of his own theory: efficient causes must be temporally contrastive. The fact that efficient causes must have this feature has implications for his account of the causal structure of expert activity.

Aristotle on Accidental Causation

Traditionally, accidental causes are analyzed as either being (i) causal yet explanatorily lacking, or (ii) causal yet infrequently so. I argue that accidental causes are in fact causally inert, relative to their non-accidental effects. It follows that, for Aristotle, causes must be commensurate with their effects.

John Buridan’s Metaphysics of Persistence

John Buridan’s theory of persistence has a surprisingly un-Aristotelian metaphysical foundation: for him, the Aristotelian inference from being highly unified to being the same to a high degree fails. In short, this fact shows Buridan’s sensitivity to the difference between identity criteria and individuation criteria.