Columbia University

Graduate Student, Philosophy

Other Affiliations: Cooper Union, Humanities and Social Sciences

Thesis Title: The Power of Agency

About

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and an Adjunct Instructor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Cooper Union.  I am writing a dissertation, "The Power of Agency", under the direction of Akeel Bilgrami.  Prior to my arrival at Columbia, I studied at the University of Toronto. 

Research Interests

My primary research interests concern the philosophy of action and agency, as well as related issues in the philosophy of mind.  My dissertation addresses a foundational problem in the philosophy of action, that of explaining the distinction between actions and mere events.  Actions, I argue, have a uniquely active component that distinguishes them from mere events and which can be explained in terms of effort.  Effort has several features: it is attributed directly to agents; it is a causal power that each agent alone possesses and employs; it enables agents causally to activate, sustain, and control their capacities during the performance of an action; and its presence comes in varying degrees of strength.  After defending an effort-based account of action and criticizing what is known as the standard story of action, I apply my account to situations in which an agent displays strength of will, such as when one struggles to perform an action while overcoming a persistent urge to do otherwise.  I conclude by offering an explanation of mental action that demonstrates the extent of our powers of agency within the domain of the mental.

Teaching Interests

I have taught undergraduate courses in a number of different areas.  At Columbia, I have taught “Introduction to Philosophical Methods and Problems” and a course in the Core Curriculum entitled “Contemporary Civilization 1 & 2”.  The latter was a year-long course that covered the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Smith, Hegel, Mill, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others.  I won the “Preceptor Award for Teaching Excellence in Contemporary Civilization” and was a Finalist for the “Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by Graduate Students”, a University-wide competition amongst all graduate students teaching at Columbia. 

At Cooper Union, I have taught courses on ethics, free will and determinism, philosophy of mind and epistemology, and a course in the Core Curriculum entitled “Texts and Contexts: Old Worlds and New”, covering the period from approximately 1500 to 1800 AD, including texts by More, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Galileo, Locke, Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin. 

At Ryerson University, I taught “Philosophy and Film”, an upper-level liberal studies elective that critically examined the very idea of motion pictures, their status as genuine works of art, the nature of documentation, the similarities and differences between documentary and fiction films, the notion of narrative structure and its place in motion pictures, and the emotional relations that viewers develop to fictional characters and events.

In my spare time, I am a co-founder and volunteer at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, an unaccredited and free art school in Manhattan, where I have taught courses on the philosophy of film, directed a public discussion on the notion of art criticism at La MaMa Galleria, and was a representative of the University at the Creative Time Summit on Revolutions in Public Practice, during the session on alternative models of education.  In addition, I am a Core Faculty Fellow at the newly inaugurated Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, whose principle aim is to provide liberal arts educational opportunities to the local community.

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