Research

‘Conceptual Agency’. 2025. Conceptual Dogmatism: Epistemology and Ethics of Consciousness-Raising Workshop | University of Vienna

• Abstract: It is a basic feature of our epistemic and discursive lives that we do not always choose the concepts with which we describe the world. I did not, for instance, choose to describe the world in terms of democracy, consumerism, and scientific consensus any more than a Medieval pauper would have chosen to describe it in terms of heresy, salvation, and piety. Rather, I inherited my concepts from the particular cultural formation in which I find myself just as the pauper inherited hers. However, since the intentional actions that agents can perform depend, as Anscombe famously puts it, on their being recognised “under some description”, this means that our possibilities for intentional action depend on the possibilities of description our conceptual repertoires make available to us, possibilities in large part beyond our control. That what we can intentionally do is so constrained duly suggests that we are in some sense unfree.

  The objective of my talk is to explore just how we ought to understand this kind of unfreedom. To do so, I shall argue that the contingency of our inherited concepts threatens to undermine their normative authority. I shall then argue that Korsgaard’s metanormative constructivism offers a compelling if incomplete response to this problem. Finally, I shall argue that appropriately supplementing Korsgaard’s picture means that we ought to understand the unfreedom that emerges on Anscombe’s picture of intentionality as a form of alienation, the amelioration of which requires modifying the parts of the world to which they are ascribed.

‘Towards a Critical Pragmatics: Power, Exclusion, and Genealogical Anxiety’. 2024. DPhil Seminar | University of Oxford

• Abstract: Robert Brandom’s 2019 A Spirit of Trust presents an expansive and powerful response to Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox – the strongest possible articulation of what Amia Srinivasan has called genealogical anxiety – by presenting an intertwined account of the social-recognitive institution of normative force and the historical-recollective determination of semantic content. While more promising than its predecessors, I argue that Brandom’s account is unsuccessful because it is not appropriately sensitive to the realities of systematic inequality exerting pressure on the practical structure of discursive relations, a fault he shares with the pragmatist programme more generally. Building on Steven Lukes’ and Kristie Dotson’s three-dimensional analyses of power and exclusion, I argue that while Brandom can account for some forms of recognitive asymmetry, he does not have the resources to respond to identity-based uptake failures nor to cases of discursive colonisation due to a thoroughgoing failure to recognise the institutional dynamics of our discursive lives under conditions of inequality. I propose instead to conceive of genealogical anxiety not as a philosophical problem demanding solution, but as a social problem from whose grip we can be freed only through practical intervention.

‘Four Kinds of Genealogy’. 2023. DPhil Seminar | University of Oxford

• Abstract: The blossoming literature on genealogy in Anglophone philosophy has come as somewhat of a pleasant surprise to the historically inclined among us. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, there have been some teething problems when it comes to the accurate apprehension of important genealogies by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Butler. As I see it, the literature on genealogy is guilty of two conflations, both of which are the result of inadequate typological maps used to organise genealogies according to perceived common features. Consequently, what makes many genealogies philosophically interesting and distinctive often remains obscure.

  In response, I propose a new typology which helps us to avoid these conflations and, in so doing, to break free of the epistemological paradigm which has thus far stymied an accurate apprehension of many genealogies which populate the literature. By getting clear on what different genealogies are actually attempting to do, we can both get a clearer understanding of the problems they face and of their critical potential. It may also, with any luck, help us see what light some of the typically misapprehended genealogies can shed on issues in the philosophy of language such as natural language semantics and rule-following.

‘Forgiveness without Contrition: Brandom’s Critique of Genealogy’. 2022. DPhil Seminar | University of Oxford

• Abstract: Genealogy is a powerful tool in our critical arsenal. Genealogies attempt to undercut the rational bases of our discursive activities. They do this by providing causal explanations which reveal that the real reasons behind why we adhere to our discursive activities are evidentially disconnected from the reasons that would actually serve as reasons for or against them. This is a danger to rationalism because genealogy provides an account of discourse solely in non-discursive terms, thereby threatening to render reasons-talk explanatorily superfluous.

  Genealogy thus poses a particular threat to Robert Brandom, one of the foremost rationalist philosophers working today. Brandom attempts to defuse that threat by arguing that it is precisely the incorporation of causal contingency into our rationally-governed discursive activities that makes them determinately contentful. Since genealogies must themselves assume the norms governing that process if they are to consider themselves determinately contentful accounts of our discursive activities, they appear to be self-undermining at a semantic level.

  I argue, however, that the norms which Brandom contends govern the process of rational incorporation leave no room for critique of any kind. This both leaves us empty handed when analysing non-ideal discursive and institutional structures, and means that Brandom himself cannot chart a course from our present non-ideal social circumstances to the ideal discursive relations he contends we are implicitly committed to implementing. We thus have reason to remain sceptical of his proposed solution.

‘Race and Racism in Kant’s Moral Theory’. 2019. Minorities and Philosophy Conference | King’s College London

‘Reasonable Pluralism and the Problem of Difference’. 2016. Philosophy Society Undergraduate Conference | University College London