Research

Research Interests

My main research interests lie in the areas of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science. My research so far has largely focused on the laws of nature. While the goal of physicists is to determine which statements are laws of nature—e.g., are the laws of the actual world the Newtonian laws or the Einstein Field Equations?—the goal of philosophers is to determine what it is to be a law of nature. There are two prominent views in this debate, Humeanism and anti-Humeanism. Roughly, Humeanism about laws is the view that the laws are not fundamental, but merely descriptive generalizations about the fundamental facts of the world, whereas anti-Humeanism about laws is the view that laws are fundamental, and govern or guide the facts of the world.

I'm especially interested in defending Humeanism about laws. Some questions I'm interested in are: To what extent are Humean accounts of laws flexible enough to accommodate the types of laws we see in scientific practice? Do anti-Humean accounts of laws give a satisfactory explanation of the robust regularity of the world? What explains how anti-Humean laws necessitate their instances?

Publications

Abstract: In this paper, I raise a novel objection to David Lewis’s Humean account of laws. The objection is that non-universal laws are metaphysically possible, but Lewis’s account cannot accommodate them. I then propose and defend an extension of Lewis’s view that gives us an account of Humean non-universal laws.

Under Review

In Progress