Research
Doctoral project
The Metaphysical Foundations of Political Philosophy
An Axiomatic Approach
Doctoral Programme in the Humanities and Cultural Sciences, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz. Dissertation colloquium, 17 June 2026. Submission planned for June 2028.
Political philosophy cannot adjudicate the disputes that divide its traditions of freedom without taking a stand on what the world contains. Its verdicts are metaphysics-laden, and professed neutrality is the covert adoption of one metaphysics, not the avoidance of all. The dissertation therefore makes the foundations explicit. It reconstructs political theories as deductive systems resting on their metaphysical commitments and compares the reconstructions by a single criterion, consistency, within each system and between its political philosophy and its account of agency. The diagnosis binds anyone who would adjudicate and who grants that there is a structure of the world to be right about. The constructive proposal does not bind: it is a wager, defended on its merits, on an Aristotelian metaphysics of kinds, powers, and natural goodness, on which to say what a kind of thing is is already to say what counts as its flourishing, so that fact and value flow from one source. The wager is tested where adjudication is hardest, on freedom, through reconstructions of Hobbes and of the modern negative, positive, and republican traditions, and it yields a new modal account of freedom built on possibility, ability, and surmountability. The case study is an existence proof that metaphysically explicit political philosophy is workable and productive.
Chapters
- The Axiomatic Method in Political Philosophy
- Metaphysics-Ladenness and the Integrative Argument
- The Modal Structure of Freedom
- Hobbes: Exemplar and Target
- Berlin and the Modern Negative Tradition
- Alternative Modal Frameworks: Republican and Positive Approaches
- The Modal Account of Freedom: An Analytical Synthesis
- Comparing the Systems and the Path Forward
Areas of interest
Metaphysics
Questions of being, substance and form: what it is for something to be (οὐσία), and how unity and structure are present in what exists.
Logic
Formal and philosophical logic, including modal logic, and the relation between formal systems and the practice of reasoning. A background in mathematics informs this work.
Political philosophy
The current focus of doctoral research: the metaphysical commitments on which verdicts in political philosophy rest, worked through on the concept of freedom, from Hobbes to the modern negative, positive, and republican traditions.
Ancient philosophy
Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, read in the original Greek. Particular attention to Plotinus’s ontology, his account of matter and evil, and his reception of the Platonic genera and Aristotelian hylomorphism.
Theses
The Intelligible Hylomorphism: An Approach to Plotinus’s Ontology
MA, LMU München, 2023. Supervisor: Prof. Peter Adamson.
Argues that Plotinus gives a hylomorphic account of Intellect and Substance, and situates this account within his interpretation of the five primary genera of Plato’s Sophist and of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It identifies missteps in prior scholarship and shows how Plotinus synthesises Aristotelian and Platonic ontology.
Domain Expansion and Rule-Following
BSc, Københavns Universitet, 2020. Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Mikkel W. Johansen.
Uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, as presented by Kripke, to examine case studies of domain expansion in mathematics: the quaternions, the gamma function, and symbolic algebra.
The Limit of Goodness: Matter as Non-Being and Evil Itself in Plotinus’s Philosophy
BA, Háskóli Íslands, 2020. Supervisor: Prof. Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson.
Presents Plotinus’s solution to the metaphysical problem of evil and defends it against criticism, through a discussion of sensible and intelligible matter in Enneads I.8 and II.4.
Full text
Publications
Forthcoming work will be listed here.