I am a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
My primary interest is in topics at the intersection of metaphysics, meta-epistemology, and philosophy of language: rationality, meaning, modality, normativity, and rule-following.
My secondary interest is in meta-ethical topics surrounding freewill, personhood, and equality.
Here are the traditional topics of my interest: the Myth of the Given, Kripke’s skeptical paradox, Putnam’s paradox, the indeterminacy of translation, equality and separation problem.
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Currently, my research project is about supplementing David Lewis’ account of language as a social convention by applying the stance approach to personhood, the genealogical approach to truth, Nagelian absurdism, and McDowellian virtue ethics.
Specifically, I am developing the view that the essence of personhood is rationality which is an attributional property, that this notion of personhood is central to language-usership, that rational agency (the capacity to make choices) consists in the Kantian power of judgment which is the aptitude to respond to stimuli with normative attitudes, i.e., with respect to norms, and that personhood as such is attributed to an individual as a reliabilist explanatory posit for interpreting behaviors and speeches.
This research involves investigating the theory of truth (correspondence and deflationary theory), the theory of knowledge (foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism), the theory of meaning (causal theory and inferentialism), the pragmatist approach to normativity, non-conceptual content, Sellars’ distinction between ought-to-do and ought-to-be, and the idea of an ideal knower (expert) and its role in epistemic activities.
Some of the classical philosophers my research centers on include early modern philosophers and contemporary analytic philosophers (Carnap, Quine, D. Lewis, Kripke, Davidson, P. F. Strawson, Wolf, Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, B. Williams). In addition, my interest in continental philosophy stems from the Dreyfus-McDowell debate.
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I received my M.A. from San Francisco State University (2020) and B.A. from UC Berkeley (2017).
email: enyim@ucsc.edu // kakaotalk: enochgojongyim