Publications

Animal Rationality Through Higher-Order Reasons (with Zsófia Virányi)
The Philosophical Quarterly. 2026

We raise a principled methodological challenge for studies that claim to show that animals are reflectively responsive to higher-order reasons and propose a new study-design that evades our challenge.

Practical Animal Reasoning
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia. 2021

I take Hanjo Glock’s account of animal agency and show how it could be expanded to argue that animals possess the concept of a reason.

Übersehene Generische Maskulina (with Marlene Valek)
zisch: zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre schreibforschung. 2021

We look at the use of gender-inclusive language in the most prestigeous German-speaking philosophy journal and hypothesize its use may be so inconsistent even within articles (hint, the journal does not have a guidebook for gender-inclusive language use).

In Progress

On What It’s Like to Act for a Reason
Motivating reasons are often held to be facts or states of affairs because of how they appear to us from the perspective of acting on them. This is then taken to imply that motivating reasons cannot be constituted by our mental states. I argue that this is wrong, defending a more sophisticated version of Davidson’s (1963) account of primary reasons via the Sartrean concepts of motifs and mobiles.

There’s a Reason to Hide Only When Being Watched: Do Dogs Respond to Higher-order Reasons? (with Ariane Veit and Zsófia Virányi)
This is an empirical study of the kind we suggest to be most promising in our paper Animal Rationality Through Higher-Order Reasons. The point is to create conditions that differentially support explanations in terms of dogs’ reflective sensitivity to normative elements in their environment.

On Being Able to Respond to Reasons
If normative reasons are facts that favor responses, must they appear to us as favoring the response in order for us to be properly responsive to them as reasons? Yes, but the appearance ‘as favoring’ is grounded in an ability that we share with many non-human animals: to intentionally guide our attention around the relevant aspects of our environment.

Selected Talks

Find a full list of my previous talks here.

On What It’s Like to Act for a Reason
Charles University of Prague, Annual Conference of the Hume Society, June 2026
UChicago, Practical Philosophy Workshop, February 2025

Animal Rationality Through Higher-Order Reasons
University of Stirling, Rational Animals Conference, June 2025
University of Laval, Everything Agency Conference, April 2025
Florida State University, Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Agency Conference, October 2024
London School of Economics, Workshop on Animal Minds, April 2024