Research

Reflecting my interests mentioned above, these are some sample papers of mine that I expect to further develop and possibly publish later on. Comments are always welcome! :)

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[ Metaphysics and Ontology of Art]​​

"Mutually Constituting Artworks and the Non-Asymmetry of Material Constitution" (Last update: 01/24/2026 [Link])

According to the Constitution View, the statue David is not only distinct from but also constituted by a piece of marble. This relation of material constitution is often assumed as asymmetric without argument; if x is a matter of y, then y cannot be a matter of x. In this paper, I offer a novel challenge to this thought with a counterexample from art: it is possible that two artists each create a readymade that constitutes each other's.​ My argument depends on two crucial premises. First, descriptivism, the dominant methodology in aesthetics, which says that our ontology of art must align with the rationally reflected artistic practice. Second, readymades realism, the thesis that readymade works are new objects created by artists instead of preexisting objects appropriated for artistic purposes. Since the latter premise is admittedly controversial, I defend it by arguing that if one already endorses the Constitution View, then one should also accept readymade realism, since the motivating reasonings for the former seem equally applicable to the latter. Then I dispel the remaining worries regarding the rationality and metaphysical possibility of two mutually constituting readymades.

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"The Problem of Inadvertent Creation and the Communal Production of Art" (Last update: 11/15/2025 [LINK])

Several philosophers have suggested that the inadvertent creation of artifacts and artworks is possible by offering scenarios in which fictional characters, tables, poems, and plates are seemingly created in the absence of a maker with creative intent. As Cray (2017), Friedell (2017), and Goodman (2021) have noted, this threatens the dominant metaphysics of artifacts, according to which for a genuine artifact of kind K to be created, there must be a maker with the intention to create a K.

In this paper, I focus on the inadvertent creation of artworks. My contribution is twofold. First, I show that the problem of inadvertent creation deepens particularly in the domain of art, for as Irvin (2005) and Thomasson (2005, 2010) argued, artists have a greater metaphysical authority than ordinary artifact makers over their creation: their creative intentions ground not only the existence and kind of their works, but also fix their particular features like individual essences, persistence conditions, and physical boundaries. Second, I offer a solution to the problem by developing a more comprehensive theory of art creation: artworks are social objects generated through collectively accepted constitutive rules that come in two varieties, the “default” rules requiring the artist’s creative intentions to fix the ontological features of her work, and the “back-up” rules that allow the art community at large to take over and communally create new works. As will be shown, my proposal has the benefits of not only preserving the insights underlying the dominant metaphysics of artifacts and capturing the centrality of the artist’s intention to the ontology of art, but also explaining how works of art can be created inadvertently in exceptional cases.

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​"A Theory of Laws with Essence and Contingency" (Last update: 9/3/2024 [LINK])

    Among existing theories of laws of nature, dispositional essentialism grounds laws in the essences of relevant properties and thereby has the advantage of explaining how laws govern particular instances with the familiar notion of essence. Unfortunately, this view also renders all laws metaphysically necessary, contra our intuition that they are merely contingent. In this paper, I propose contingent dispositionalism, a novel theory of laws that both retains the explanatory merit of dispositional essentialism and respects our contingentist intuition at face value. My suggestion is that the nature of a natural property supporting a law of nature L includes (1) the core essential disposition E which all possible instances of the property must exhibit and (2) the intraworld constraint that all (or most) instances within each world consistently display one among a suitable class of different precisifications of E, which includes L. (Longer, old version available dated Dec 12, 2022: [LINK])

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"A Constructive Metaphysics for Fictional Characters and Their Creation" (My writing sample for PhD application) [LINK]

​     Creationism about fictional characters states that characters are created by authors. Despite its intuitive appeal, this position faces the problem of explaining how exactly fictional entities are created. I argue that to settle this problem, Creationists should embrace Constructive Creationism, according to which characters are constructed out of the properties ascribed to them in fiction and that any adequate theory of this stripe must meet two desiderata, Constitutional Flexibility and Constitutional Indeterminacy. Then I claim that the Property Construct View I develop satisfies both desiderata by introducing the relation of property constitution, a variant of material constitution, between a character and the properties ascribed to it. I further claim that the view gives a good explanation of the creation of fictional characters while drawing a parallel with the construction of ordinary concrete artifacts and pointing out some hitherto neglected similarities between characters and representational artworks. ​

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[ Ethics ]

"In Defense of Roskies’s “Acquired Sociopath” Counterexamples" (Last update: Dec 16, 2022) [LINK]

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[ Philosophy of Religion ]

"Mystical Experience, Perception, and Cognitive Influence" (Last Update: 10/01/2024) [LINK]

    Religious experiences occupy a central role in the perpetuation and enrichment of religious practices. Among such experiences, a certain vivid, spontaneous class of them are “perception-like in that they have a similar kind of directness and undeniability to the subject” (Baker & Zimmerman, 2019). In the analytic philosophical literature, Alston (1988, 2005) has offered a systemized account of this type of experience in the Christian tradition, where the subject experiences God as a directly perceived object. His key claim is that one can have perceptually justified beliefs about God thanks to such experiences. Drawing on numerous historical reports of “mystical perception” and their resemblance to ordinary sensory experiences, he argues that we should treat such experiences as providing direct perceptual justification for the relevant theological beliefs. To do otherwise would be to hold “an arbitrary double standard,” attributing “prima facie justification to experientially grounded beliefs in one area and not in the other” (2005, p. 207).

    Due to the recent surge in empirical findings on the topic of religious experience, two novel epistemic challenges have arisen for Alston: (i) mystical experiences are treated as instances of imagination or thought by scientists, threatening their status as perceptual states; (ii) the cognitive influence of one’s religious background on one’s mystical experience is far greater than in sensory cases, eroding the parallel Alston draws between mystical and sensory experience and leading us to question whether such experiences can provide any legitimate epistemic justification.

    Here I argue that Alston’s claim nevertheless stands. To (i), I answer that even if certain mystical experiences are mental imagery or inner speech as the recent psychological models suggest (See Luhrmann, 2011; McCauley & Graham, 2020), they can still count as perception given a reliable covariance relationship with spiritual reality on Goldman’s (1977) account of perception. To (ii), I reply that not all religious experiences have been reported to align with the subject’s prior religious beliefs and that even when a mystical experience takes the same content as the penetrating unjustified antecedent belief, this does not eliminate the justificatory capacity of the said experience insofar as the operative belief-forming practice tends to track truths. (Longer, old version including further points dated 8/28/2023: [LINK])