Academic interests
I’m a PhD student with the ERC-funded Good Attention Project at the University of Oslo. I am also a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I am jointly supervised and where I resided for 4 years before coming to Oslo.
I work on topics in Metaethics, Epistemology, and Ethics. In particular, I am trying to work out some norms of attention and then explain how these are situated within the broader normative landscape. This task is trickier than it looks because attention has both practical and epistemic faces. Attention is necessary for action, and it is also a central way (perhaps the central way) in which we can exercise control over what we come to know about the world. Attention shares some features with action and some with belief, but it is not exactly like either of them. Getting a grip on the normativity of attention should give us some clarity on normativity more generally.
I am currently engaged in two avenues of research. The first is focused on explaining the sense in which objects non-instrumentally “merit” or “are worthy of” attention. To provide such an explanation, I have developed an account of the fittingness of attention. My account accommodates contemporary philosophical accounts of attention and respects the broad conception of fittingness that has recently received considerable attention in metaethics.
The other avenue of research concentrates on attention’s role in inquiry and belief formation. Attention is often invoked (albeit tacitly) in discourse on the zetetic turn, doxastic wronging, and doxastic voluntarism. These debates concern (in order) whether the normative domain of epistemology ought to be under the purview of the domain of inquiry, whether beliefs can wrong, and whether belief formation is under our voluntary control. Understanding attention’s role in inquiry and belief formation enables us to adjudicate these debates more clearly.
Background
I got my BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the Open University. I have an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oslo, and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Awards
- Georg Morgenstiernes Prize 2018 (awarded for outstanding effort in the Master's Thesis)