Published

The Aesthetic Dimension of Value, forthcoming, Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

James Shelley recently claimed that aesthetic value is a determinate of value. But aesthetic value doesn’t seem to exhibit the same structural features that other determinates do. I give several objections along these lines, and instead propose that aesthetic value is a determination dimension of value.

In Progress. Happy to talk about or share the latest draft of any of these.

A paper on what it is for there to be kinds of value

Strong value pluralists believe that there are at least two irreducible kinds of value. What unifies the plurality of values into a “kind”? Traditional models of value kindhood rely on the genus-species or the determinable-determinate relation. I show that both of these models fail and develop a novel account of the unity of value. I then show how my account generates interesting results when applied to the X-First debate and to the metaphysics of multidimensional value aggregation.

A paper on reductive theories of aesthetic value

I argue that all reductive theories of aesthetic value should share the same general form. This has two surprising implications: the question most theorists have focused on—why aesthetic value is valuable—is trivial, and any answer to the question of what demarcates the aesthetic domain is subject to far greater explanatory burdens than we once thought.