Where I Am

I am an assistant professor of philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale near Grand Rapids, Michigan.  I do research and teach in the areas of epistemology, metaphysics, analytic philosophy, and phenomenology, especially the ideas of Edmund Husserl. 

In my spare time I like to read and listen to music.  I know some German and even less Italian, but continue trying to improve my knowledge of both languages.  I enjoy running, cooking, jazz, travel, and, well, other interesting things too. 

Where I’ve Been

I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay where I majored in Philosophy and minored in Humanistic Studies, graduating in the Spring of 2002.  At Green Bay I studied lots of Phenomenology, Husserl and logic, as well as personality theory and the History of Philosophy.

I did both my M.A. (2005) and my PhD (2009) at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.  At Buffalo I studied ontology, logic, some phenomenology and history of philosophy, and gradually came to focus on areas of contemporary analytic philosophy, especially epistemology. 

    I spent 2006 on a scholarship at the Institute for Ontology and Medical Information Science in Saarbrücken, Germany.  While in Germany I focused mainly on issues of metaphysics and applied ontology, but also took advantage of the opportunity to learn some German and also to explore what philosophers are doing in Europe, primarily by attending some conferences. 

    I defended my dissertation in Spring of 2009.  My dissertation is in epistemology, focused on the topic of a priori justification.  I approach this issue largely from the perspective of contemporary analytic epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, but also make liberal use of sources from the phenomenological tradition. 

    I was hired by Grand Valley State University   near Grand Rapids, Michigan, as an assistant professor in Spring of 2008.

On Philosophy

I would be lying if I said that I don't enjoy studying, talking about and teaching philosophy.  I find many philosophical issues intrinsically interesting, and I think that, even if this was their only merit, spending time thinking about them would still be better than a great number of other activities that human beings have figured out how to engage in.

     That being said, I don't study philosophy just to entertain myself.  I believe in the more or less traditional idea that thinking about issues in metaphysics and epistemology can help us gain insight into our nature as human beings, which can in turn illuminate what it is good for us to do, both personally and collectively.  Studying philosophy can, at least eventually, help us to become better and live better lives.  I thus study and teach philosophy for these reasons as well, perhaps primarily. 

    Whether or not philosophical questions admit of definitive resolution in terms of 'final' or 'ultimate' knowledge of truth is a perennially difficult question.  However, I think that, even if we must be fallibilists as a matter of fact, this does not mean that the idea of fully grounded true belief in answers to fundamental questions about being and morality should not function as something like a regulative ideal or guiding end for the inquiry in which we engage.  Philosophy is nothing less than the attempt to discover what is true regarding the subject matters it investigates, however difficult it might be to actually achieve this.   

     On the other hand, philosophical inquiry should be self-critical in the sense of turning back on itself and questioning its own assumptions and methods.  Even crucial notions like "knowledge", "truth" and "existence" are fair game for philosophical scrutiny, and should be.  As such, I am suspicious of attempts to artificially constrain the space of possibilities that are admissible for consideration in philosophy, whether these constraints are being proposed from the perspective of prior religious commitments, or from the perspective of some version of contemporary naturalism.