Some people think that in order to evaluate a work of art, we need not know anything about the author’s biography. I’m inclined to the opposite view. Research is not quite art, and I’m not sure I’d say the same here, but I do think the biographical context adds a nice personal touch to the research.
Moral Realism & Theism
When I started working on my PhD, my idea was to explore similarities between arguments for and against moral realism and arguments for and against theism. Back then I was still religious, and this was a way to explore my religious beliefs. This article was my first experiment in that project and also the first article I ever wrote. It took a few years until it got published, and in the meantime I deserted the project and deserted religion. I still think this paper makes a good point:
The Explanatory Challenge: Moral Realism Is No Better Than Theism
Somewhere in my dissertation I had a footnote making what I thought was a minor point. David Enoch, one of my supervisors, saw the footnote and suggested that I turn it into an article. Somewhat skeptical, I went ahead and wrote it up. I argued that theists can’t explain how God knows math. My colleagues thought this was a crazy argument, and rightly so. After all, if God exists, how God knows math would be the least of our puzzles about God. We were all surprised when it was accepted for publication, and again when whole articles were written in response and published in a prestigious philosophy of religion journal (1, 2):
A Reliability Challenge to Theistic Platonism
Calling for Explanation
Instead of comparing arguments in philosophy of religion and metaethics, without taking much of a stand as to whether these are good arguments, I decided that it’s more important to assess these arguments. So I wrote a paper discussing Hartry Field’s reliability argument against mathematical Platonism and its correlates.
Our Reliability is in Principle Explainable
Field’s argument is premised on the claim that our reliability in certain domains calls for explanation. Inspired by the work of and conversations with David Enoch, Roger White and Josh Schechter, I realized that nobody really understands what calling for explanation means, and yet some prominent arguments are premised on this idea. Step by step I started digging more into this topic. This is how the following few papers came about:
Why Do Certain States of Affairs Call for Explanation? A Critique of Two Horwichian Accounts
How Can Necessary Facts Call for Explanation?
Calling for Explanation: An Extraordinary Account
For most of the years I spent working on calling for explanation, I could not come up with a view that I felt comfortable with. Some days I liked one view, other days a different view. So I had to decide that it doesn’t matter what my own view is, or even if I have one, for each paper I’ll do my best to argue for some view, and see what comes out in the end. This paper ended up being the closest to the view I develop in my book:
A Strike against a Striking Principle
I told Orly Shenker, a philosopher of physics specializing in thermodynamics, that I’m exploring the idea that there are facts that call for explanation. She proposed that we examine together a debate in her field about whether a certain fact calls for explanation. This paper is the result. The most important thing I learned from this project is that saying that a fact “calls for explanation” can have different meanings:
Calling for Explanation: The Case of the Thermodynamic Past State (with Orly Shenker)
Evolutionary Debunking Arguments
As a postdoc in 2017 I took part in a research project on biology and ethics. This paper is the result of that year. I spent a lot of time, during my PhD studies and after, thinking about evolutionary debunking arguments in metaethics. In this article I articulate some of my thoughts:
No Need to Get Up from the Armchair (If You Are Interested in Debunking Arguments in Metaethics)
I collaborated with Justin not because I agree with him, but to the contrary, because we disagree. Justin thinks modal security is a good principle, I disagree. After having some conversations about this, we decided to experiment with adversarial collaboration. I raised the best challenges I could think of to Modal Security, and together we worked out what could be said in response. Sometimes, the response comes at a theoretical cost. The result of this process: Neither of us radically changed our views , but we both made some revisions and are much clearer on where exactly we stand. We don’t specify our personal conclusions in the article. My own view is best described in argument 4, I think modal security is true but in a trivial and misleading way:
Modal Security (with Justin Clarke-Doane)
Miscellaneous
In the fall of 2013 I visited MIT and, trying to absorb all that I could from their wonderful philosophy department, I attended a seminar on conditionals by Justin Khoo. Since the semantics of counterpossibles are important to an issue that concerned me in metaethics (I explain in my ‘No Need to Get Up from the Armchair’), I volunteered to present in class Brogaard and Salerno’s paper. The result of that presentation is this critique:
How Close Are Impossible Worlds? : A Critique of Brogaard and Salerno’s Account of Counterpossibles
I grew up an Orthodox Jew, devoutly studied the Torah and the Talmud for many years, trained as a Rabbi, and then my beliefs radically changed. In this article, intended for a broader audience, I engage with some of my former beliefs. It was originally written in Hebrew while I was a fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute‘s Human Rights and Judaism project. The English version is not merely a translation, it is significantly improved:
A Moral Argument against Absolute Authority of the Torah