email: jdealy {at} philos.umass.edu

I am a PhD student in philosophy at UMass Amherst. After receiving a BA in philosophy from Auburn in 2008 and working for a year as an assistant to the philosophy department, I went to Northern Illinois University and studied philosophy for two more years. I started at UMass in the fall of 2011. I am interested in a broad range of topics. Most of my main interests fall under the headings of metaphysics and metametaphysics, but I'm also substantially interested in topics in language, mind, philosophy of science, epistemology (traditional and formal), metaethics, practical reason, action, and decision theory. I also have a general interest in the history of analytic philosophy, early modern, and Kant.

My current interests include: (i) a bunch of topics in metaphysics (mereology, time, persistence, causation, fundamentality, properties, quantity, modality, individuals, etc.) and metametaphysics (commitment, disagreement, epistemology of modality, Kant) (ii) the nature of and relations between truth, linguistic meaning, propositional attitudes, intentionality, reference, possibilia, natural properties, intention, convention, and interpretation, (iii) vagueness, (iv) the structure of scientific theory, (and by extension, metaphysical theory), (v) intuitions and philosophical methodology, (vi) consciousness and the first-person perspective, (vii) action, (viii) value, (ix) Neo-Pyrrhonian skepticism.