“…a human something moving about in a general culture-medium.”
–Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

I am a philosopher writing about cognition, science, and art.

My work centers on practices of representation, classification, and taxonomy in science and everyday life. It addresses questions such as: How do we, as individuals and cultures, create ways to sort and structure our environment? How do these conceptual categories shape our experience, institutions, and discourse? How are these categories embedded in technological devices and systems? And how does adopting such categories advance or hinder our material, social, epistemic, and aesthetic goals?

One aim of this project is to explain how we are able to generate adaptively flexible systems of concepts and how these concepts are entwined with perception and action, body and world. Another is to address problems of knowledge integration across communities. Here I am particularly interested in how scientists working in different fields coordinate their investigations to construct unified models of complex systems such as the mind/brain.

I have also written art criticism for a number of venues. Recently I have begun working on topics in the philosophy of art, including images and the limits of representation and the genealogy of modernism.