RSS 1.0Philosophy (Scholarly Publications)
Recent Submissions
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Explanation, justification, and egalitarianism
(Springer, 2021)This paper argues that the philosophy of explanation can help inform core debates in value theory. Specifically, it argues that there is a consistent parallelism between the properties of explanation and the properties ... -
Social Anarchism and the Rejection of Moral Tyranny
(Cambridge University Press, 2023)This book aims to provide a philosophical defense of egalitarian anarchism, more popularly known as social anarchism. It is certainly not the first book to attempt to defend this position; numerous egalitarian anarchists ... -
Luck egalitarianism without moral tyranny
(Springer, 2022)Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to ... -
Conflicts of Rights
(Palgrave, 2025)It is often assumed that conflicts of rights are both common and inescapable. The main thesis of this chapter is that this assumption is questionable. First, I will define conflicts of rights and contrast the definition I ... -
Human rights and equality
(2025)Human rights are often thought to express an egalitarian idea. This chapter argues that the connection between human rights and equality is more tenuous than it first seems and a robust egalitarianism is neither the input ... -
Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 2: Margaret Cavendish and Berkeley's Attitudes Towards Women
(2023)In Part 1, we explored how Berkeley drew from Homeric literature and used literary techniques such as satire to challenge his “freethinking” philosophical opponents in “The Pineal Gland” story published in The Guardian in ... -
Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 1: Homer, Descartes and Pope
(2023)Berkeley is best known for his immaterialism and the texts that extol it—the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. He made his case by treatise, then by dialogue, and this tendency ... -
Self-Ownership and the Duty to Assist
(2022)Libertarians are attracted to the self-ownership thesis because it seems to satisfy four important theoretical desiderata. First, the thesis treats all persons equally by assigning them the same initial set of rights. ... -
How to Explain the Direction of Time
(2022)Reichenbach explains temporally asymmetric phenomena by appeal to entropy and ‘branch structure’. He explains why the entropic gradients of isolated subsystems are oriented towards the future and not the past, and why we ... -
Ructions over Fluxions
(2022)Following the publication of Berkeley's caustic critique of calculus, The Analyst (1734), numerous figures in the scientific world responded to the text's allegations of rigour violations and a culture of mathematics-laced ... -
Freedom's Values: the Good and the Right
(2022)How is freedom valuable? And how should we go about defining freedom? In this essay, I discuss a distinction between two general ways of valuing freedom: one appeals to the good (e.g., to freedom's contribution to well-being); ... -
Review of: Billy Christmas: Property and Justice. A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights. New York: Routledge, 2021
(2022)In this book Billy Christmas advances an interpretation of justice grounded in a distinctive theory of property. Christmas’ account of property is at the same time pluralistic – it justifies various forms of property of ... -
"Tint and Form": The Geometric Philosophy Underlying Oliver Byrne's Elements
(2022)Oliver Byrne published his ground-breaking and visually remarkable edition of Euclid’s Elements in 1847. The book is extraordinary: its pages are adorned with generous four-colour diagrams, illustrations and grids, and ... -
What message are we sending bottle-feeding families when we place formula in the same retail category as cigarettes?
(Image Magazine, 2021)I have a powerful memory of first reflecting on Irish breastfeeding politics. I was 20 and visiting a then- new American coffee chain that had arrived on my local main street. Amid trying to figure out which series of ... -
Reciprocal Libertarianism
(2022)Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper I show that reciprocal libertarianism ... -
Moralised Definitions of Freedom, Autonomy, and the Personal Value of Opportunities to Perform Morally Impermissible Actions
(2021)Are the opportunities to perform morally impermissible actions valuable? And, if so, has their value any role to play in normative arguments? In this essay I examine the personal value of opportunities to perform morally ... -
Shameless luck egalitarians
(2023)A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ ... -
Explanation, Justification, and Egalitarianism
(2021)This paper argues that the philosophy of explanation can help inform core debates in value theory. Specifically, it argues that there is a consistent parallelism between the properties of explanation and the properties of ... -
Luck Egalitarianism Without Moral Tyranny
(2022)Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to satisfy ...
