About
I work on themes at the intersection of metaphilosophy, aesthetics and bioethics.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin.
I am a member of the
American Voice in Philosophy project team.
Education
- PhD (Philosophy), University College Dublin
- HDip in Computer Science, University College Cork
- MA (Philosophy) University College Dublin
- BA (English and Philosophy) University College Dublin
Publications
Recent Articles
“Lateness and the Inhospitable in Stanley Cavell and Don (with Aine Mahon)”, Philosophy and Literature, Volume 40, No. 2, October 2016.
“Philosophy and Informality: A Response to Margolis”, Contemporary Pragmatism, Volume 13, No.1, 2016.
“Richard Rorty (with Maria Baghramian)”, 2015, International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
“Putnam Writing: Argumentative Pluralism and American Irony”, 2014, Journal of Philosophical Research. Projects
Stanley Cavell’s New Human Nature: Cavell on paradigms, plasticity, machines and birds.
Abstract
Stanley Cavell is rarely invoked as part of conversations about posthumanism. Equally, Cavell’s interest in philosophical naturalism and how it informs our conception of the human receives little attention, both in the literature on Cavell and on philosophical naturalism more broadly. In The Claim of Reason (1979) Stanley Cavell employs a vocabulary that is reminiscent of Hume’s naturalism with an insistence on the facts of our nature and the role our natural reactions play in experience and understanding. However, Cavell’s humanism and naturalism are not straightforwardly of the Humean sort, and his inspiration is not only Hume, but, more substantially, a Kant-inflected reading of Wittgenstein. Cavell deflates and naturalises the Kantian schemata along Wittgensteinian lines into shared criteria, a grammar that structures our encounter with the world. Our shared criteria may present as conventional but as Cavell suggests “underlying the tyranny of convention is the tyranny of nature” (p. 123). In this nexus of criteria Cavell locates our nature, our specific form of life. Nevertheless, Cavell does not endorse a fixed, static conception of that nature. Cavell takes our shared criteria to be subject to change. This change is not to be understood merely at the level of convention, but as a change in our natural reactions (in thought, language, action) to what the world confronts us with. One of the examples Cavell supplies as an illustration of what a different set of natural reactions might consist in is Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm. A new paradigm, Cavell suggests, might represent the “idea of a new human nature”, a new set of natural reactions (p. 121). Cavell’s aim is to relate the concept of human nature to scientific knowledge and practice in a way which does not reduce to either bald conventionalism or bald naturalism. This aim does not prevent him from supplying substantive account of what he takes our current nature to be: we are creatures who are continually driven to repudiate the natural basis of our knowledge of the world, a phenomenon that Cavell calls living our scepticism. In his later work, I pay close attention to In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), Cavell develops this account through a range of examples that explore our relationship to the machine (focusing on the 19th century horror genre) and to nature (in British romanticism). But in these exploration a tension persists. Is this will to repudiate our “naturalness” a temporary configuration or an unchanging facet of human nature? With this tension in view I explore some features of Cavell’s conception of a plastic human nature and assess its potential as a critical intervention into posthumanist inquiry.
“Bare Humanity and Privileged Imagination: Literary examples and the responsibilities of moral inquiry”
Abstract
Some recent disagreements in practical philosophy between orthodox and heterodox antagonists turn on the question of whether any real sense can be attached to the concept of “bare humanity”. These disagreements also turn on the role imagination can and should play in how we assess and answer to our moral obligations. There is a simple reason for why these disagreements intersect: the concept of “bare humanity” as developed by heterodox philosophers relies on our ability to “imaginatively” identify with others who may lack the requisite marks and features, capacities, capabilities, properties and dispositions that we require to be present in order to satisfy the concept of human favoured by orthodox moral philosophers. I track this disagreement from the vantage of somebody who locates themselves in the heterodox camp. As such, a goal here will be to show that the this imaginatively-infused moral concept is a valid one. Nevertheless I will also be arguing that the orthodoxy’s scepticism with respect to the moral salience of bare humanity should still interest the heterodox moral philosopher. I also worry about a move that is common to many heterodox views: a methodological foreclosure of lines of rational inquiry on the basis that there are intuitively repugnant. The relevant sense of intuitive here involves the idea that the appropriately nurtured moral imagination – a moral imagination that has successfully undergone appropriate bildung of the kind that the heterodox philosopher advocates – will intuitively resist the suspect line of inquiry, a resistance which should the ben understood as an effective reductio of the approach. I argue that this kind of foreclosure is as premature and near-sighted as the orthodox foreclosure on as substantial role for imagination in moral inquiry and deliberation.
“Can the concept of Late Style be defended?”
Abstract
The notion of a late style – a style exhibited in the works of an ensuing, typically final, stage in the trajectory of an artist – continues to enjoy popularity as critical concept, even if it no longer claims the levels of interest that followed the posthumous publication of Edward Said’s On Late Style (2006). It is difficult to speak about a single concept. The theoretical elaborations and critical uses of the concept are diverse, ranging from superficial markers of chronology to robust and highly- developed claims about persistent features of ‘a late style’, features that span balance and serenity but also dissonance, and aesthetic and communicative intransigence. It is better to think of late style as a family of concepts, though notions such as innovation, renewal and intensive creativity are recurring motifs. Late style has, consistently, been a controversial and contested notion, and some of the best accounts of late style in the literature are extremely critical of the concept, for example, McMullan (2007). I look at some of the key criticisms of the notion of late style with particular attention to the charges that late style is a cultural construct rather than an intrinsic property of the works themselves (McMullan 2007) and that it is a construct that ultimately ageist in character (Hutcheson 2012). I ask whether we can recover a version of late style that withstands these criticisms and yet retains explanatory force. As part of my response, I evaluate the reception of some putative examples of late style from contemporary and near-contemporary literary fiction, with a focus on the later works of Samuel Beckett, Don DeLillo, Saul Bellow and Iris Murdoch.
“Moral Status and Ageing”
Abstract
Moral Individualism, the view that the intrinsic moral status conferring characterises possessed by an individual, trump extrinsic (often agent relative) characteristics such group memberships, shared experiences, social and familial bonds is arguably the dominant view in practical moral philosophy. The ramifications of Moral Individualism for those with disabilities is currently a subject of a controversy in disability studies where there appears to be a deep disjunction between the moral attention we feel is due to those with disabilities and what “the theory” allows. One concern with Moral Individualism runs as follows: creatures like us are often at our most vulnerable when we lack, either through loss, or having been contingently denied (through a genetic or birth defect for example) the relevant moral status-conferring characteristics. Opponents of moral individualism ask: why is our moral attention to be withheld from the most vulnerable among us? The status thus denied to those with disabilities is also denied ipso facto to the significant percentage of human beings who will experience old age and the loss of some or all of those characteristics that hitherto underwrote their claims to moral attention. I examine some of the strategies being used to counter this approach – in particular imaginative, creative or narrative strategies influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein where the goal is less to develop an overall theory, but rather to demonstrate the heterogeneous, quotidian ways in which moral status persists, beyond a categorical-metaphysical understanding of what it is to be an object of moral concern as part of rich, imaginatively-infused conception of the moral life Upcoming Talks and Conferences
Difficulty, Style and the Moral Face of Philosophy
Ethics: Form and Content
7th March 2018,
Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
(
programme)
Bare Humanity: Imagination and Method
The Value of Sentience: Empathy, Vulnerability, and Recognition
A Conference in Animal Ethics
7th March 2018,
UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life (CEPL), UCD Dublin
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programme)
“Stanley Cavell’s New Human Nature: Cavell on Paradigms, Plasticity, Machines and Birds”
9th Beyond Humanism Conference
20th July 2017,
John Cabot University, Rome
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programme)
“Can late style be defended?”
Cultural Narratives, Processes and Strategies in Representations of Age and Aging.
28th April 2017,
Medical University of Graz, Austria
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programme)
“Difficulty, philosophy and value in Wittgenstein”
Pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the Virtues: Three Heterodox Approaches to Ethics.
15th September 2015,
Newman House, UCD, Dublin
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programme)
“A Deep Tension Within Pragmatism: Putnam and Price on Truth and Justification”
2nd European Pragmatism Conference.
11th September 2015,
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
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programme)
“Philosophy and Informality: Reply to Margolis”
“The Reaches of Pragmatism”, Summer Institute in American Philosophy
June 13th 2015,
University College Dublin, Ireland
(
programme)
“On Cavell and Don DeLillo”
Philosophy, Literature, America
May 31st 2014,
Newman House,UCD, Ireland
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programme)
“Late style and late philosophy”
Summer Institute in American Philosophy,
July 10th 2013,
University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon
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programme)
“How to Read Putnam: Argumentative Pluralism as an American Tradition”
SAAP 2013 Conference 40th ANNUAL MEETING,
March 9th 2013,
The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
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programme)
