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, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaethics: rationality, meaning, modality, normativity, and rule-following.
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 (or the Singer problem), conflation problem.
===
My research is on the concept of personhood. Specifically, I am developing the view that the essence of personhood is rationality qua attributional property irreducible to physical conditions, that this notion of personhood is central to moral agency and language-usership, and that rational agency consists in the Kantian power of judgment which is the aptitude to respond to stimuli with normative attitudes.
Currently, my project focuses on what it is to attribute personhood (specifically moral agency) to an individual. On the one hand, Dennett’s consequantialist (forward-looking) compatibilist view of freewill construes moral agency as the reason-responsive capacity that is instrumentally attributed to individuals to guide their behaviors. On the other hand, the Strawsonian (backward-looking) responsive-dependence, quality-of-will view of responsibility seeks to identify the (non-instrumental) fitting conditions for holding reactive attitudes towards individuals. My dissertation will explore the relationships between these two views and apply them to analyzing the moral status of AI, i.e., whether AI could be held morally accountable.
The theoretical framework that inspires my approach is the Sellarsian stereoscopic vision of the scientific and the manifest image of the world.
===
I received my M.A. from San Francisco State University (2020) and B.A. from UC Berkeley (2017).
email: enyim@ucsc.edu // kakaotalk: enochgojongyim