Current Research Projects

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My dissertation, titled “A Thomistic Account of Self-Knowledge and Its Value” tackles a number of questions around self-knowledge by drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. While there is a wealth of historical scholarship on Aquinas’s account of self-knowledge, there is a surprising lack of philosophical work that draws on Aquinas in order to tackle self-knowledge questions which contemporary philosophers are interested in, such as how we know our mental states and the nature of self-awareness My dissertation addresses this lack, and further expands self-knowledge discourse by also treating questions of how we know our character, defending a conception of knowing one’s nature as self-knowledge, and addressing the value of knowing oneself.

Related to this reseach I am working on topics and questions described below. If you want to learn more about these projects please contact me.

Self-Awareness and Aquinas: Is there a way to make sense of our first-personal self-awareness within Aquinas’s metaphysics and psychology? Some have argued that Aquinas’s thought provides no grounds for understanding first-personal self-awareness, while others have argued that there are grounds in Aquinas. In my own work, I articulate an understanding of first-personal awareness based in Aquinas's way of thinking about the metaphysics and function of cognitive powers as means of cognition.

Knowing One’s Mind: How do we know our mental states? This paper puts forward an account of how we know our mental states drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical psychology and epistemology. I draw on Aquinas’s treatment of angelic knowledge of human minds and his distinction between speculative and practical knowledge to distinguish two kinds of knowledge of mental states. In speculative knowledge we come to know the nature of our mental states or have theoretical knowledge of our own mind. In practical knowledge, we know our mental states in our use of them or have agential knowledge of our own mind. I argue that the agential knowledge we have of our own mind is what grounds our sense of authority in the first-person ascription of mental states to ourselves (“I think it will later” “I want Chinese food”) and provides for the epistemic security which we enjoy with respect to our own mental states

Knowing One’s Character: How do we know our own character? While contemporary epistemologists have largely ignored this question, it is one which scholastic thinkers addressed in terms of knowing habitus. I provide two models for how we know our character, an inferential model drawn from contemporary epistemology and a “perceptual” model drawn from Thomas Aquinas. I argue that the perceptual model is superior to the inferential model. I do this by first arguing that there is a difference between knowing one’s own character and knowing another’s character, and then arguing that the inferential model fails to capture this epistemic difference while the perceptual model does capture the distinction. Finally, I develop the perceptual model further in defending it against objections.

The Value of Self-Knowledge: Why do we care about knowing ourselves? According to some, such knowledge has purely instrumental value, i.e., we value knowing ourselves insofar as it is helpful for pursuing and achieving other goals. If this is the case, then a good life does not seem to require self-knowledge as a constitutive part. In this paper, I argue against a purely instrumental understanding of the value of self-knowledge. Instead, I argue that self-knowledge is necessary for a good life. Drawing on Aquinas’s conception of virtue and natural happiness, I argue that one cannot achieve virtues constitutive of a good life without knowledge of oneself.