Authority
5 writings
From Habitus to Systema: Keckermann and the Pedagogical Origins of Cognitive Systematicity
Under review
Argues that the early modern systema of knowledge began life around 1600 as a teaching machine, before it became a metaphysical or epistemological ideal. Scholastic learning had rested on the authority of the Church and on a habitus cultivated over years of disputation; after the Reformation, the new Protestant confessions had to train pastors and teachers rapidly and at scale. Tracing how Ramism made learning spatially surveyable and how Bartholomäus Keckermann’s Systema logicae (1600) joined Ramist method to Aristotelian substance, the paper shows that the system externalized cognitive order, transferring work once performed by formed persons and institutions into visible, reproducible structures of exposition. Philosophy, in Alsted’s formula, is a habitus in the mind and a systema outside it. The virtues of the new form were those of a mechanism: surveyability, reproducibility, and independence from any particular teacher. Reinforced by print and paper technologies, and dignified by a metaphysical warrant inherited from the Stoic systema mundi, the teaching machine would later be asked to certify truth and to ground impersonal authority. The paper ends by asking what the passage from Summa to systema compressed out—a question that returns whenever new technologies, from the card index to the algorithmically generated summary, promise to shorten the path to understanding.
Download PDF
The Authority and Politics of Epiphanic Experience
Zeitschrift für Ethik und Moralphilosophie (ZEMO) – Journal for Ethics and Moral Philosophy 9, 8 (2026). doi:10.1007/s42048-026-00250-y
In response to Chappell’s work on epiphanies, the article first questions the normative authority of epiphanic experiences over more sober reflection, warning that their power can distort our values and lead to a kind of “transcendent ventriloquism” before challenging Chappell’s political solution of “conversational justice,” arguing that its rationalist constraints ultimately undermine the very experiential and emotional dimension that epiphanies were meant to champion.
Download PDF
The Ethics of Conceptualization: Tailoring Thought and Language to Need
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2025. doi:10.1093/9780198926283.001.0001
Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering.
Download PDF
The Shaken Realist: Bernard Williams, the War, and Philosophy as Cultural Critique
European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 226–247. 2023. With Nikhil Krishnan. doi:10.1111/ejop.12794
Offers a new reading of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by bringing out the wider cultural resonances of the book. Far from being simply a critique of academic tendencies, the book turns out to be about ethical issues that acquired particular urgency in the wake of WWII: the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life.
Download PDF
Function-Based Conceptual Engineering and the Authority Problem
Mind 131 (524): 1247–1278. 2022. doi:10.1093/mind/fzac028
Identifies a central problem for conceptual engineering—the problem of establishing the authority of engineered concepts—and argues that this problem cannot generally be solved by appealing to increased precision, consistency, or other theoretical virtues. Solving the problem requires engineering to take a functional turn and attend to the functions of concepts. This also helps us alleviate Strawsonian worries about changes of topic.
Download PDF