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.
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Currently, my research project is on the concept of personhood. 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 consists in the Kantian power of judgment which is the aptitude to respond to stimuli with normative attitudes, and that personhood as such is attributed to an individual as a reliabilist explanatory posit for interesting behaviors and utterances.
My approach is inspired by the way David Lewis sets up the problem of radical interpretation. My argument is that, although physicalism is compatible with personhood, it cannot account for the distinctive explanatory value of applying psychological terms (instead of physical terms) to an individual because the scientific image of the world alone cannot accommodate the normative aspect of personhood.
In prospect, I plan to apply my view of personhood to various topics in AI ethics, specifically the question of whether AI can have rights and responsibilities.
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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