About

I was working on a PhD in mathematics, focusing on set theory, when I encountered the philosophical puzzle of mathematical truth and undecidability: what should we say about the truth of statements of set theory that cannot be proved or disproved from the standard axioms? Wondering about this, I turned my attention to philosophy, and my interest in mathematical truth grew into an interest in the nature of truth and justification more generally. I did my Philosophy PhD at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and wrote a dissertation on truth, supervised by Penelope Maddy.

Since then my interests have broadened to include ethical theory, philosophy of economics, and philosophy of sex and love. I’ve also become increasingly committed to doing philosophy in a way that engages with and reflects on real, practical situations and problems.

My initial research in ethical theory, prompted partly by Ruth Barcan Marcus’s work on moral conflict and dilemmas, resulted in a body of work discussing moral reasoning and value pluralism, including my 2015 book on that subject. In philosophy of sex and love, I focused first on sexual objectification then wrote an introductory book covering a range of topics.  

Around the time of the financial crisis in 2008, with economic models much in the news, I became interested in philosophy of economics as a domain that involves both normative issues and topics in philosophy of applied mathematics. Recent work in this area focuses on normative aspects of quantification, formalization, and optimization. I’ve also written on autonomy, ambivalence, desires, theories of truth and economic theories of love. You can read more about these projects and topics on my research page. 

I’ve been at the University of Waterloo since 2004, where I teach courses on philosophy of economics, philosophy of mathematics, ethics, and logic and supervise students in our MA program as well as both our Applied Philosophy PhD program and our more traditional Philosophy PhD program. 

Before coming to Waterloo, I was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University, and in 2008 I spent a semester as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Michigan. 

I am a former member of the editorial board at the Canadian Journal of Philosophy  and a current associate editor at the Journal of Applied Philosophy. 

Page last updated Dec 28, 2025