Bio

After studying the classical liberal arts at Thomas Aquinas College, I went on to pursue my graduate studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago (M.A.), the Universite de Paris IV (Sorbonne) and Trinity College Dublin (Ph.D).  During my doctoral studies, I also held visiting fellowships in Fribourg (Switzerland), Munich, and Athens.  I am presently a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, editor of the Harvard Journal of Bioethics, and will receive my master's degree in Bioethics from HMS in May 2019.

I primarily focus on the work of Aristotle with particular emphasis on his ethics and metaphysics and the contributions he can make to contemporary moral and metaphysical questions.  I also have strong research interests in virtue ethics, natural normativity, teleological forms of explanation, contemporary neo-aristotelian metaphysics (hylomorphism, causation and powers, essentialism, the structure of objects), virtue epistemology, moral psychology, value theory, moral realism, theories of well being, the capabilities approach, natural law theory, double effect reasoning, just war theory, practical rationality, theories of justice, moral luck, incommensurability, supererogation, moral saints, the ethics of care and empathy, moral sentimentalism, the role of the emotions in the moral life, ethical issues in end of life care, the ethical implications of contemporary biotechnology, the philosophical foundations of human rights and dignity, concepts of public reason and the public sphere, the history of modern social and political thought, and genealogies of modernity and postmodernity.