Hi there. I am a Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Kentucky.

I specialize in metaphysics and ontology. I think about what there is, parts and wholes, composition, constitution, persistence, and modality.

I am especially fond of exploring transworldism, the view that ordinary objects such as tables and chairs are stretched across possible worlds. This is an unusual view motivated by the intuition that ordinary objects are crucially connected to their potential: what a thing could be is literally part of what that thing is. Philosophers often cash out talk of possibility and necessity – modal discourse – in terms of possible worlds. If modal features are in fact parts of objects, then one way to interpret this is the bold thesis that ordinary objects are composite sums across different possible worlds.

I also work at the intersection of metaphysics, mind, and language. In particular, I’m a proponent of mental fictionalism, the view that we are (or should be) fictionalists about mental content.