My research focuses on questions that lie at the intersection of philosophy and the social sciences, with an emphasis on how we deal with our limited understanding of and control over the world around us, the role sympathy plays in our lives, and how diversity impacts groups. While these topics might initially look eclectic, my work on all of them is animated by a common concern: how do individuals navigate the frictions associated with living in community with one another so that they might capture the benefits of social cooperation? Further tying together my work are three methodological dispositions reflected in the approaches I’ve taken to asking and answering this question. The first disposition is an interest in highlighting how overlooked (or sometimes just misunderstood) aspects of work by figures in the history of philosophy can help provide traction on contemporary debates. The second is a commitment to bringing empirical and theoretical work in the social sciences to bear on philosophical problems, and especially to using simple formal models borrowed from those literatures to provide clarity and analytical rigor to the analysis of those problems. And the third is a commitment to doing collaborative work that draws on the differing perspectives and toolkits of myself and my coauthors to generate work that we would have been unlikely or unable to produce on our own.
Below are links to pages that contain abstracts and copies of most of mypublications, as well as summaries of both my work in progress and some ideas in search of co-authors.
