Creativity, as the production of creative products, intuitively requires both intention and novelty. However, these two elements seem to stand in tension: if a product is novel to the creator, it appears they could not have intended it, and if they intended it, it seems it cannot be novel to them. This paper explores and dissolves this apparent tension. I begin by discussing the necessity of both intention and novelty for creativity. I then critique Antonia Peacocke’s refinement model of creativity, which seeks to reconcile the requirements of intention and novelty through the concept of a proto-work. I argue that there are creative products that the refinement model fails to recognize as such, including those that result from open-ended creative processes. In response, I propose a programming theory of creativity, which distinguishes between broad planning intentions and more specific implementation intentions. On this view, creative products emerge when planning intentions probabilistically constrain implementation intentions, allowing for novelty within an intentional framework. This model captures a wider range of creative phenomena—such as exploratory research and improvisational art—while preserving the intuitive roles of both intention and novelty in creativity.

This paper explores how Kant’s moral theory can apply to infants, arguing that they are best viewed as non-person ends-in-themselves. I first show that infants are not persons, which might suggest they are things given Kant’s famous person/thing distinction. However, drawing on Christine Korsgaard’s work in animal ethics, I argue that “person” and “end-in-itself” can be decoupled. I then address infants' moral status, proposing they are non-rational animals who may one day become persons, rather than flawed rational beings. Finally, I address an objection that a Korsgaard sympathizer might raise regarding my application of her ideas to infants. [draft upon request]

This paper argues the principles we find in Audre Lorde’s normatively rich sexual ethics serve as a springboard into her political philosophy. A textual puzzle in Lorde’s writing about sexual encounters is resolved to yield a two-layered ethic that makes sense of judgments about sexual permissibility and sexual goodness. This framework of sexual ethics, the compatibility theory, is then shown to have direct application to Lorde’s ideas about politics. Just as Lorde thinks we ought to prefer good sex to merely consensual sex, she favors a sensitivity to interdependence in the face of difference over a politics of mere tolerance. Ultimately, this paper seeks to demonstrate a unifying thread in Audre Lorde’s thought that going beyond merely permissible acts in our dealings with others to cultivate a richer understanding of interdependence is the preferred route to sexual and political flourishing [in progress].

1. A paper on how group-directed empathy may work. 

2. A paper on testimonial injustice wherein the person receiving testimony (i.e. the hearer) is the harmed party. 

3. A paper about the "invasive species" concept. (adapted from undergraduate thesis).