I grew up in California, studied English and Philosophy at Oberlin College, and earned a PhD from NYU.

I work in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and aesthetics, and write the newsletter Mostly Aesthetics.
 

Some recent work:

• On experiencing music from within argues that hearing music as (say) sad often involves imagining expressing one's sadness with the music.

• Sometimes, whether S is fictional in a story depends on whether other things fictional in that story are good evidence for S; see When (imagined) evidence explains fictionality.
• I defend a new reduction of modality to "moodless" facts in The Tenseless Theory of Time and the Moodless Theory of Modality and The moodless theory of modality: an introduction and defense; indeed, it is, as far as I know, the first such reduction to be proposed.
• Two concepts of double prevention cuts the gordian knot of "is double prevention causation?"
• Two essays I wrote on Mostly Aesthetics will appear, lightly edited, as one, in a book symposium on Daniel Groll's book Conceiving People.

Objective Becoming defends the "Block Universe Theory" of time. It also shows that The Moving Spotlight Theory of Time is a better theory than people tend to think.

Reasons Why argues that a "theory of explanation" should answer the question, what is a reason why Z? The book then argues that the reasons why something happened are its causes and the "grounds" of its happening.

The book's core idea is that "higher level" reasons aren't automatically also "lower level" reasons: sometimes, A is a reason why (B is a reason why C), but A is not itself a reason why C.

The core idea of Causation, Explanation, and the Metaphysics of Aspect is that the aspectual distinction between stative and non-stative verbs corresponds to the metaphysical distinction between being and doing. This idea is used to defend a non-pragmatic theory of background conditions, to isolate a species of structural explanation, and to argue for the primacy of agent causation.