Core Areas of Inquiry
My current research is in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, approached from a background in 19th and 20th century Continental philosophy and Critical Theory — Adorno above all. Across both, I am interested in the same set of problems: the normative dimensions of experience, what we owe to what is not us, and whether practical reason can be reconstructed once its traditional foundations are given up. I also work on environmental philosophy, and I build software for teaching logic.
Works in Progress
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Hegel, Mastery and Servitude, and the Pathologies of AI
I read Hegel's dialectic of Mastery and Servitude onto the structure of relations between human beings and AI systems. The point is normative but not moral — I bracket what we owe AIs as moral patients. My argument is that for AI to play a constructive role in social and political life, it must have certain characteristics and those characteristics must be recognized appropriately by its human interlocutors. The lesson of the dialectic is that misrecognition defeats the master: as these systems take on infrastructural roles in domains that were until recently exclusively human, failing to recognize them properly undermines us as autonomous social and political agents.
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AI and Creativity
Beardsley describes artistic creativity as a prolonged process of self-criticism, in which the artist adopts or rejects each new idea by perceiving its relations to what has already been adopted. I argue that this description fits what a large language model does when it selects the next token by attending to its context. Against the objection that these systems cannot really choose because they lack desires or internal goals, I argue that this presumes an account of human creativity that will not survive scrutiny — many genuine exercises of human creativity are neither transparently goal-directed nor obviously intentional. My conclusion is that the standard criteria for withholding creativity from these systems either move the goalposts or beg the question.
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Properties, Forms of Life, and the Moral Status of Animals
McMahan defends moral individualism by driving a wedge between the properties that make an individual a member of a kind and the properties that confer moral status. I argue that in pressing the Wittgensteinians — Diamond, Crary, Gaita — to name the property picked out by "the human" or "a form of life," he begs the question at issue. I take up Crary's critique of objectivity as the most promising response, identify where her account runs into trouble of its own, and propose an alternative answer to McMahan. The argument extends to artificial minds as well as animals, and Adorno arrives as the punch line.
Talks & Presentations
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Vibe Coding a Speech Feedback App: Building an AI Speech Coach for the Aesthetics Classroom
A case study in building working software without a computer science background. I walk through how an AI speech coach for my Aesthetics course was designed through extended conversational prompting rather than written line by line — including the pivot from a speech-to-text pipeline to a natively multimodal model that hears delivery directly, and the decision to make the course rubric the system instruction. I close with what students actually did with it, and with the objections from students who refused to use it: privacy, environmental cost, training labor, and skill atrophy. Those objections are design constraints, not resistance to be managed.
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Hegel, Mastery and Servitude, and the Pathologies of AI
On what Hegel's dialectic of recognition shows about our relations to AI systems as they take on infrastructural roles. See Works in Progress above.
Earlier talks and panels
- Debater, “AI and the Environment” Center for AI and the Liberal Arts, UMW September 2025
- Panelist, Provost’s Panel: AI and the Liberal Arts UMW August 2025
- “AI and Teaching” Teaching and Learning Day, UMW May 2025
- Panelist, “AI Intersections: Ethics, Education, and Technological Philosophy” Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, Eastern, 40th Annual Regional Conference, Emmitsburg, MD October 2024
- Panelist, “AI and Pedagogy” Faculty Development Day, UMW May 2024
- “AI and Writing Pedagogy: Some First Practices” Faculty Pedagogy Colloquium, UMW February 2023
- Panelist, “ChatGPT: What Is Happening at UMW?” Center for Teaching, UMW February 2023
- “Rejecting Nature as Abstraction: Reading Han and Adorno Together” Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 60th Annual Conference October 2022
- “Toward a Leftist Case for Cryptocurrency” Virginia Humanities Conference 2022
- Commentary on Adam Moore, “Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft” American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, 115th Annual Meeting 2019
- “Arendt and Leopold on History and Nature” International Society for the Study of Environment, Space, and Place, 14th Annual Conference 2018
- “Critical Theory and Environmental Limits: Apocalypse, Rage, and the Spell” International Association for Environmental Philosophy, 20th Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City 2016
- “Rage, Self-Preservation, and the Spell: Adorno in the Anthropocene” Radical Philosophy Association Conference, Lexington, KY 2016
- “An Ecology of Politics, a History of Nature: Arendt and Leopold” Indiana and Kentucky Philosophical Associations Joint Meeting, Owensboro, KY 2015
- “Adorno on Nature and Experience” International Association for Environmental Philosophy, 17th Annual Meeting, Eugene, OR 2013
- “Is the Historicizing Project Still Radical?” (workshop, with J. Eric Lambert and Shannon Proctor) Radical Philosophy Association Conference, Buffalo, NY 2012
- “The Commodity Form and the Empty Space of Nature” Historical Materialism Conference, York University, Toronto 2012
- “Adorno, Suffering, and Universals” International Social Philosophy Conference, Toronto 2010
- “The Political Imagination and Political Subjectivity” Colloquium, Grand Valley State University 2009
- “Adorno, Imagination, and the Political” Brennan Conference, Loyola University Chicago 2007
- “Adorno, Habermas, and the Limits of Enlightenment” (with Kelin Emmett) International Social Philosophy Conference 2004
- “MacKinnon and the Possibility of Feminism” Radical Philosophy Association, Central APA 2004
Peer-Reviewed Articles & Chapters
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Adorno on the Possibility of Nature
I present an interpretation of Adorno's concept of nature that forces a confrontation with both the domination of nature and its romanticization. The normative stance I recommend is situated not in the idealization of a pre-social or pre-human nature, but in the missed possibilities of past human engagements with non-human nature — possibilities the experience of art, such as Edward Burtynsky's photography, can push us toward. This in turn requires reconsidering the dominant form of self-preservation in contemporary societies: nature cannot be realized until our species understands itself as a species.
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Kant and the Intellectual Virtues: “Good and Stupid”?
Kant is often read as severing the intellectual virtues from the moral ones — as though, on his account, one could be morally good and yet thoroughly stupid. I argue that this reading misunderstands how far Kant's moral philosophy already depends on capacities we would recognize as intellectual virtues.
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Adorno, Experience, and the Possibility of Practical Reason
Adorno is widely taken to leave no room for practical reason. I argue otherwise by working through his distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, locating the normative purchase of his thought in the body's aversion to suffering — an impulse that is neither a moral principle nor a mere feeling, but the point from which practical reason can be reconstructed.
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Reviews & Commentary
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Review: Introduction to Philosophy
I assess this open-access introductory anthology as a working instructor would: what it covers, how accessible it actually is, and which pedagogical assumptions are built into the way it is organized. My interest throughout is what it does and does not give someone teaching a first course in philosophy.
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Suffering and the Messianic
I read this book's account of suffering and messianic hope against the critical-theoretical tradition it draws on, and ask whether the messianic can bear the normative weight the argument places on it.
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Review: To Think Like a Mountain: Environmental Challenges in the American West
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Review: Green Wars: Conservation and Decolonization in the Maya Forest
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Rethinking the Normative Basis of Environmental Thought
Vogel argues that environmental philosophy should give up nature as its normative foundation and begin instead from the built environment we actually inhabit. I take that challenge seriously rather than defending the concept of nature by reflex, and press on the question it leaves open: once nature is set aside, what is left to do the normative work?
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Thinking Politics Together: Arendt and Adorno?
Rensmann and Gandesha's collection is the first sustained attempt to read Arendt and Adorno comparatively, setting aside the personal hostility between them to look for affinities across their work. I ask how far the pairing actually holds. Reviewing what the volume gains by thinking their politics together, I press on the points where the differences between them resist the synthesis — and on whether the question posed by my title admits of a settled answer.
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Second Order Desires and the Devaluation of Humanity
Liao, Sandberg, and Roache propose “human engineering” as a response to climate change — pharmacologically induced meat intolerance, smaller humans, cognitive enhancement to lower birth rates, enhanced altruism and empathy. That the discussion has arrived at this sort of solution is itself indicative of how dire our situation is, and on that much I agree with them. But their proposal doubles down on the technocratic promise already implicit in the alternatives it rejects: all three approaches begin from the assumption that economic growth can and should continue indefinitely, leaving more technology as the only remedy for environmental crisis.
I press two related criticisms. First, the proposal’s voluntariness rests on a Frankfurtian second-order desire: the authors assume people wish they could give up red meat and merely lack the will, treating meat consumption on a parallel with addiction. Whether such desires are actually widespread among the heaviest consumers is an empirical question, and the paper’s own premise — that too few will change absent intervention — makes it unlikely. Second, the proposal demotes human beings to one more element of nature with which we may do as we wish. In engaging Sandel the authors answer a position no one holds, that all intervention in nature is impermissible, and so miss his actual concern: the one-sided triumph of willfulness over giftedness. The result preserves the overconsumption of high-income nations along with its two ideological supports, infinite growth and technological rescue, while turning us explicitly into the sort of thing we have long implicitly held non-human nature to be. The irony is that this frustrates the very ends growth was supposed to secure — human freedom and flourishing.
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Review: Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed
I compare three introductions to Habermas, asking what each makes of his central commitments and, more practically, which of them is actually usable by a reader coming to him for the first time.
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Grants
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Developing a Public Liberal Arts Humanities Curriculum: Empowering Students to Navigate an A.I. World
My contribution was a four-week unit, “Hegel and AI: Thinking About the Dialectic, Thinking About the Self,” for a course in 19th century European philosophy. Students read the self-consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit — self-certainty, mastery and servitude — alongside Beiser on the dialectic and intersubjectivity, Buck-Morss's “Hegel and Haiti,” and Chalmers on whether a large language model could be conscious. The closing assignment asks students to evaluate Chalmers from a Hegelian position: what does a developmental, socially mediated account of self-consciousness add to the question of machine consciousness, and what would an LLM have to acquire to count?
The unit is also an argument about how to teach with these tools. Rather than asking a model to explain Hegel, I built bots that occupy the positions Hegel describes — one that holds the standpoint of sense-certainty and cannot step outside it, one that argues as a self-consciousness staking its life on recognition — so that students meet the limits of a position by pressing on it. Every AI exercise is paired with writing done without AI. Learning to prompt precisely is a stated outcome of the unit, on the view that this is now part of what it means to read and write in the humanities rather than a technical add-on.
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Summer Pedagogy Grant — AI and Digital Intelligence
Dissertation
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Adorno and the Possibility of Practical Reason
I argue that Adorno's critical theory, despite its reputation for normative reticence, supports a substantive account of practical reason — one grounded in experience and in the aversion to suffering rather than in principle.