some papers at earlier stages of development (feel free to email me for discussion or drafts)

Anger’s Misfit: on the (un)fittingness of mental attitudes

 Anger is typically framed as a psychological response that may be understandable in the face of injustice, but one we ought to manage, temper, or transcend. This paper rejects that framing. I argue that in conditions of political and structural injustice, anger is not merely fitting or permissible—it is required, and its absence can constitute a normative misfit. Building on work by Cherry, Srinivasan, Bell, and Lorde, I distinguish virtuous political anger from vengeful or merely personal anger, characterizing the former as world-directed, harm-averse, and justice-tracking. I then develop three central claims: (1) the absence of anger in the face of serious injustice can itself be misfitting—not simply neutral, but a normative failure; (2) appeals to alternative moral emotions (e.g., “radical love”) mistakenly treat anger as a competitor rather than a co-constitutive response; and (3) standard theories of emotional fittingness—whether correctness-, permissibility-, or reason-based—accounts of fit, struggle to capture anger’s distinct normative role, revealing the need for the newly articulated category of misfittingness, which permits graded error rather than merely binary fit/unfit judgments.

Horseshoes and Hand grenades: the internalist’s ideological dilemma

 nternalist and externalist theories of justification have long disagreed over whether epistemic credit depends on world-involving success or the quality of an agent’s internal epistemic conduct. Recently, radical epistemology has sharpened this dispute by emphasizing the pervasive role of oppressive ideology in shaping agents’ cognitive lives. This paper argues that these pressures expose a neglected instability at the heart of internalism: what I call the Horseshoes and Hand Grenades dilemma. If internalism evaluates agents by how close they come to truth (horseshoes), it tacitly imports externalist success conditions. But if it evaluates agents merely by the quality or sincerity of their epistemic effort (hand grenades), it risks treating justification as wholly insensitive to the distorting force of ideology. Framed metaphorically: does epistemic justification reward getting close, or merely giving it your best shot?

Examining internalist commitments to “trying,” epistemic responsibility, and internal duplicates (e.g., brains in vats), I show that internalism cannot simultaneously (i) retain a success-independent standard of justification, and (ii) offer principled critical resources for assessing belief-formation under ideological distortion. I conclude that meeting the challenge of radical epistemology requires an aspirational epistemology—a preconception of epistemic norms that treats epistemic “trying” not as a minimal corrective, but as a substantive, normatively structured achievement capable of underwriting epistemic evaluation even when success is blocked by non-accidental social oppression.

Bad Altruism: on ignorance and Lewisian time travel

Kant on the Bounds of Ignorance

Kant’s remarks on ignorance remain comparatively underexplored. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on upstreamignorance—pre-doxastic factors shaping cognition—while neglecting downstream ignorance that arises after belief-formation (Chignell 2007). A further reason for this gap is methodological: epistemology has long privileged the study of knowledge (epistēmē) over ignorance, sidelining ignorance as a philosophical category. Recent work in epistemology, however, has initiated a normative turn toward ignorance, prompting renewed interest in how agents ought not to be ignorant.

I argue that Kant offers significant but overlooked resources for this project. I focus on two features of his account: (1) the metaphor of a cognitive horizon in the Jäsche Logic, which models the bounds of possible ignorance and helps explain when ignorance becomes epistemically criticizable, and (2) his three maxims for counteracting error—thinking for oneself, thinking from the standpoint of others, and thinking consistently with oneself. While the attribution and scope of the horizon metaphor remain disputed, I show that it provides a productive framework for theorizing epistemic limits and obligations. I conclude by identifying tensions within Kant’s maxims that raise challenges for a fully normative theory of ignorance.