Peer-Reviewed Papers
“Aquinas on the emotion of hope: A psychological or theological treatment?” forthcoming American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
“Thomas Aquinas on the Virtues of Character and Virtuous Ends” (with Alexander Stöpfgeshoff) forthcoming Review of Metaphysics
“Should Moral Vegetarians Avoid Eating Vegetables?” forthcoming Food Ethics
"Rethinking Aquinas on the passion of despair" forthcoming New Blackfriars
“Thomas Aquinas on the Basis of the Irascible-Concupiscible Division,” Res Philosophica 97 (2020): 31-52
"Varieties of the cruelty-based objection to factory farming" Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 (2019): 377-390
“Why hope is not a moral virtue: Aquinas’s insight” Ratio 31 (2018): 214-232
“Repairing humanity's broken watch: Leibniz on original sin” Studia Leibnitiana 42 (2018): 245-260.
“Hope and practical deliberation”Analysis 77 (2017): 495-497.
“Deflating moods,” The Southwest Philosophy Review 3 (2017): 25-32
“Leibniz on unbaptized infant damnation,” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 80 (2016): 185-194.
“Anti-luck virtue epistemology and divine revelation,” Philosophia 42 (2014): 309-320
"In defense of virtue-responsibilism," Logos & Episteme 4 (2013): 201-216
“God, time, and the Kalãm cosmological argument,” Sophia 52 (2013): 593-600
"The conciliatory view and the charge of wholesale skepticism,"Logos & Episteme (3): 619-627
Dissertation: Emotion in Action: Hope’s Role in Practical Deliberation
Most philosophers think that when one deliberates about what to do—for example, how to get to work on time—all emotions, including hope, ought to be suppressed in favor of dispassionate reasoning. I argue for a very different position in my dissertation: I argue that hope motivates and sustains practical deliberation, and, hence, that hope has a significant and valuable place in human life. In the first two chapters of the dissertation, I argue that Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Hobbes, two otherwise very different philosophers, agree that the emotion of hope motivates practical deliberation. My goal in these chapters is to recover the different accounts given by Aquinas and Hobbes of exactly what hope is and how it figures in deliberation in order to advance our understanding of the historical significance of the emotion of hope. In the third chapter, I combine the conceptual insights of the preceding historical chapters with present-day psychological research: on the basis of a consideration of the role of hope in the treatment of depression, I argue that hope motivates and sustains practical deliberation—one must hope in order to deliberate about what to do.