I am an associate professor of philosophy at Yale-NUS College. My research projects are in philosophy of mind and epistemology.

1. Mind

My main project is to defend the pluralist theory of perception. On this theory, when I see an orange mango, my perception consists of two importantly different kinds of awareness, exercised in concert.

First, there is my representational awareness of the mango and its instances of orange. This awareness literally contains the mango and its instances of orange within its spatiotemporal boundaries. This explains why my perception positions me to to understand the reference of expressions like "that object." A matching hallucination would involve a failed representation of a similar kind, which explains why all perceptual experiences have a phenomenology that distinguishes them from sensory imaginings, episodic memories, and thoughts.

But my perception involves a second and very different kind of awareness. This is my awareness of the universal orange itself. This awareness is non-representational, and it reveals part -- but not all -- of the essence of the sensory quality orange. This kind of awareness also occurs in hallucination, sensory imagination, and episodic memory. This generates the hard problems of consciousness in a uniform way across all of these mental states or events.

2. Epistemology

My side project is to offer a reductive theory of normativity, with emphasis on epistemic normativity. On my telic internalist view, any subject's having a foundational reason to φ is grounded primarily in her having a final personal aim of φ-ing. Roughly, whether this aim is conative or cognitive then determines whether the foundational reason is practical or epistemic.

In my spare time, I dance salsa and bachata. Here are some of my performances: 2019 mix; 2019 ballroom; 2018 bachata; 2018 salsa.