I received my PhD in 2001 from Duke University, where I wrote my dissertation, Free Will and the Knowledge Condition. I was an assistant professor at Florida State University from 2001-2005 and program chair for the 2005 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP). Since 2005, I have been a member of the Department of Philosophy and the Brains & Behavior program at Georgia State University, back in my hometown of Atlanta, where I grew up, attended Emory University, and met my wife, Cheryl.

My research is devoted to the study of human agency: what it is, how it is possible, and how it accords with scientific accounts of human nature. My primary focus right now is the free will debate. I have written papers with several graduate students on ordinary people’s intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, as well as the phenomenology of free will. In these papers in the new field of “experimental philosophy,” we discuss empirical studies we have carried out on ordinary people's intuitions and experiences of free will, and we discuss the role such data should play in the philosophical debates (see “Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Mechanism: Experiments on Folk Intuitions”, "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" “Surveying Freedom”, “The Phenomenology of Free Will", and “The Past and Future of Experimental Philosophy”).

Other recent papers include "Close Calls and the Confident Agent," which reflects on the significance of alternative possibilities for free will; "The Psychology of Free Will," which discusses the relevance of psychological research to the free will debate; and "Free Will and the Threat of Social Psychology," which examines results from social psychology experiments that potentially threaten free will. The last paper represents one part of a book project in progress, Free Will and the Sciences of the Mind. In it I first offer a naturalistic theory of free will focusing on the importance of self-knowledge—especially our ability to know what we really want and how to act on it. This account of free will, which analyzes it as set of cognitive capacities possessed and exercised to varying degrees, is amenable to scientific inquiry. In the book, I examine various sciences of the mind (e.g., social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, each of which presents interesting challenges to this theory of free will but may also provide support for it (see also “Agency, Authorship, and Illusion” and "When Consciousness Matters"). I also correct some of the mistaken conceptions about how these sciences are supposed to threaten free will.

I believe the free will debate is less about the question of determinism than the question of the mind-body relation. I am interested in how to understand that relation, especially in the study of consciousness and introspection (see my "Verbal Reports on the Contents of Consciousness: Reconsidering Introspectionist Methodology" and "The Problem of Pain"). I am also interested in the development of agency in children (e.g., theory of mind research) and the evolution of agency in primates (e.g., inhibition, theory of mind, reciprocity, and deception) (see "Is Human Intelligence an Adaptation? Cautionary Observations from the Philosophy of Biology" and "Darwin's Continuum and the Building Blocks of Deception"). Finally, I examine the intersection of the above questions with questions about moral responsibility and the moral sentiments.

I enjoy teaching very much and find that my research is motivated by my attempts to make philosophical questions interesting and relevant to my students (see “Polling as Pedagogy” and "Some Practical Suggestions for Teaching Small Philosophy Classes"). Recent graduate seminars include "Ethics, Agency & the Sciences of the Mind," "Philosophy of Mind: Consciousness and Mental Causation" and "Issues in Free Will" and I have also taught a course on "Teaching Philosophy" for graduate students. At the undergraduate level, I have taught Philosophy of Mind, Introduction to Philosophy, Ethical Issues and Life Choices, Free Will and the Sciences of the Mind, and various Honors seminars. I won the 2003 Superior Honors Teaching Award from the Florida State Honors program.

Outside of philosophy and my family, some of my interests include playing soccer, watching Duke basketball, politics, movies, my dog Maggie, and making up songs on guitar for my sons, Lucas and Sam.