Comings & Goings
September 2026 · I am on the job market this year, with a defense planned for Spring 2027. The CV has the full record; drafts of dissertation chapters are available for the asking.
June–July 2026 · I was a fellow at the 2026 edition of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, held in Geneva, NY — three weeks with an amazing group of researchers from dozens of disciplines and backgrounds, all in the same place and exploring intelligence from every angle. I came as a philosopher, hoping to find out whether my framework and its formalisms are genuinely useful to people studying real minds or only tidy on paper, and I left with collaborations that put the formal and empirical sides in contact concretely enough that I could name the mechanism. Two of them are still running (see more under Research, “Structure Where Formalization Runs Out&rdquo). This experience turned out to be more influential on my research and thinking than I had expected, and it still felt surreal when I looked back months later.
May 2026 · Talk: “Yoneda Essence and Structural Identity,” at Defining the Formal Foundations of Intelligences, held at Indiana University Bloomington’s Center for Possible Minds. The workshop is part of an NSF-funded project on collaboration across research into artificial and natural intelligences. Presenting the Yoneda material to people approaching structure from formal, empirical, and computational directions at once changed what I take the principle to be for. Several of the questions I was asked there are now questions the project is about.
April 2026 · Talk: “How to Stop Worrying and Embrace Musical Platonism,” at the APA Pacific Meeting, held online this year.
March 2026 · I was awarded the American Society for Aesthetics Dissertation Fellowship for 2026–27, together with a Dean’s Prestigious Supplement Fellowship from UT that made taking it up possible. The year goes to finishing the dissertation, keeping the collaborations moving, and following the questions that have collected at its edges. My thanks to the ASA and to the Dean’s office for the room to do all of this.
March 2026 · Talk: “Generating Structures: An Essentialist Account,” at the 2026 Henle Conference on Essentialism in St. Louis, two days on (essentially) essence and nothing else, which is a rare thing to get.
March 2026 · Talk: “How to Stop Worrying and Embrace Musical Platonism,” at the ASA Pacific Meeting in Berkeley. Its first outing; the version I gave at the APA a month later was much improved by what happened here.
February 2026 · Talk: “Beyond the Given: Toward a General Theory of Generativism,” at the APA Central Meeting in Chicago. One of the most useful hours the paper has had.
October 2025 · Commentary on Andrew Kania’s “Justifying and Advancing the Explication of the Musical-Cover Concept,” at the ASA’s 83rd Annual Meeting in Baltimore. I spent a free morning at the Baltimore Museum of Art, whose Cone Collection hangs Matisse returning to the same motifs across the better part of his career. Standing in front of that, Kania’s question about the cover-concept stopped looking like a question about music in particular. Whatever settles it, I doubt it is something we read off the object.
May 2025 · Talk: “Toward a General Theory of Generativism,” at Metaphysical Mayhem 2025, the week-long biennial metaphysics workshop hosted by the Rutgers philosophy department, where the generativism project first got a hearing in a room full of metaphysicians — a plurality as pure as ever.
February 2025 · I was awarded the University Graduate Continuing Fellowship at UT for 2025–26, and earlier a Humanities Research Award from the Humanities Institute. That was a clear and productive research year, and I am grateful to both programs for making it possible.
February 2025 · At the APA Central, held online: a talk, “Doing Away with Works: Let’s Talk About Music,” and a commentary on Matthew Shields’s “The Impossibility of Conceptual Abandonment.”
January 2025 · Talk: “Abstract Object and Platonic Inheritance,” at the APA Eastern Meeting in New York. The talk was in a work-in-progress session, and in retrospect it is the seed of everything since. The generativism project grew out of questions that session put to me, and so did most of what followed from it. Many thanks to everyone who was in that room.
December 2024 · I was awarded the Billy Bob Draeger Graduate Research Fellowship in the Humanities for 2024–25 — a year that produced the work now anchoring the dissertation.
May 2024 · Talk: “Cohesion, Clarity, Closure: How Music Navigates the Wake of Tragedy,” with Ellen Sirower, at the Performance Philosophy Biennial Conference, which happened to be in Austin that year. It was the first thing we did together and it started both a collaboration and a friendship. We are still writing, with an ongoing conversation about performance.
April 2024 · Talk: “Musical Formalism Reconsidered: A Category-Theoretic Approach,” at the ASA Eastern Meeting in Philadelphia. The earliest version of what became the dissertation’s last chapter. It is also where I finally met Kendall Walton, whose work I had been reading since my undergraduate years and who turns out to be a cellist as well. He was generous about a paper that was not yet very good.
February 2024 · Commentary on Minseok Kim’s “Way-Nominalism: An Ontological Ground for Non-Nominal Quantification,” at the APA Central Meeting in New Orleans — a city where I spent the evenings in jazz clubs, listening to music that is far easier to describe as a way of playing than as any object there to be counted. It occurred to me later that this was probably the last APA meeting to be held there. Philosophy will miss the company of that music — though, as Kim would be the first to point out, that is not the only way of doing philosophy.
November 2023 · Talk: “Music as Meaningfulness Without Meaning: A Schopenhauerian Account,” at the IX. International doctoral colloquium of the Schopenhauer-Forschungsstelle at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, held online. A version of the paper appeared in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics that year.
July 2023 · Talk: “In Defense of a Real Musical Platonism,” at the ASA Rocky Mountain Meeting in Santa Fe. The first talk I gave to a real audience, in both senses: in a room rather than on a screen, and in front of philosophers rather than undergraduates. It was also where the platonist view about music first went out in public, and I have been refining it since.
July 2023 · Talk: “An Inferentialist Account of I,” at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World, in Fresno. A detour into philosophy of language that I have not been back to since.
September 2022 · Talk: “Music as Meaningfulness Without Meaning: A Schopenhauerian Account,” at the UT Austin Graduate Colloquia Series. Its first outing, in front of my own department.
July 2020 · Talk: “Sound, Silence, and Sartrean Nothingness,” at the Boston College Dianoia symposium, held online. An invitation off the back of an undergraduate paper, and the first talk I gave anywhere (and a high point of the pandemic that had been going on for months).