I am a postdoctoral fellow with David Enoch’s ‘Liberalism Rekindled’ Project out of the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I live in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

I specialize in political and feminist philosophy. I am mainly concerned with why citizens ought to better understand one another, and how they should do so.

My current research has two components: 

      1. Understanding and Democracy

A. ‘Knowing (with) Other Citizens’:

This project concerns what citizens ought to know to be competent political agents in a world rife with disinformation and informational burdens. Usually the picture of what citizens know is quite bleak. Citizens, as is perhaps unsurprising, are often rather ill-informed on matters of politics. I argue that there is nonetheless good news on this front. Citizens possess a kind of knowledge—knowledge of other persons— that constitutes their politically-salient competency to consider others.

B. ‘The Possibility of Democratic Empathy’

This project concerns how democracies pool our different capacities to empathize uniquely for different persons, dependent on how we know and understand them. I aim to develop a picture of the value of democracy that hangs not on individuals representing their own interests, nor the common good, but the pooling of our interpersonal interests and the overlap of our interpersonal relations.

2. The Ethics of Proselytizing

A. Can Religious Proselytizers be Epistemically Harmed?

Proselytizing has a bad rap. I argue that, for the most part, this bad rap is overblown. Stronger than this, I argue that this bad rap can distort, and so thwart, proselytizers attempts to convince others of the truth of their beliefs. This occurs when proselytizers are viewed as necessarily ‘forcing’ their beliefs on others when they are not.

B. In Good Faith: What is wrong with religious proselytizing?

I also think that proselytizing can go wrong. The account I am currently developing construes this wrong in relational terms. I argue that the wrong of proselytizing is similar in kind to the wrong of being fully honest with those we love; sometimes we have a duty to withhold the whole truth from them.

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I also like to hike, do yoga, listen to records, and bake (I’m not very good at it though).