I have many interests in philosophy, but my three primary research areas are the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of technology, and the early 20th century phenomenological movement.

In the philosophy of mind, I focus on perception. I defend a type of naive realism on which all perceptual experiences, including cases of hallucination, involve relations to worldly objects. Broadly, I do this by arguing that hallucinations are not cases that fall short of perception, but cases that involve perception, plus something else. Even more specifically, I model hallucinations on picture perception, arguing that when we hallucinate, we experience hallucinatory objects by perceiving worldly objects. I defend this view in my dissertation and a couple of published works, but I am also in the process of completing a monograph offering new details, arguments, and empirical support for this view.

As part of a generation that saw the introduction of home computers, video games, and the internet, I spent a lot of time tinkering with computers, and in virtual environments. Although I started with a lot of interests, and my second PhD in information science has expanded these interests further, what I am most attracted to is virtual reality (VR) technology, broadly construed to include augmented, mixed. Its connections to perception, and phenomenology, make it near irresistible. I’ve written on all aspects of VR, including VR metaphysics, epistemology, perception, ethics, aesthetics, and design. I recently completed a dissertation on living with VR technology, which I am in the process of editing into a monograph.

My work at the University of Arizona’s College of Information Science extended my philosophical work to more hands-on engagement. I can build virtual environments, video games, and a variety of AI model types from the ground up using C#, HLSL, Python, R, Asperite Blender, and Unity, and I have filmed and edited VR video art with VR cameras and Premiere Pro. A lot of things interest me in these areas and having recently completed the PhD I’m yet to fully engage with everything I’ve learned. But I have particular interests in computer graphics, building interactive simulations, using AI models to enhance virtual environments, and human-computer interaction (HCI).

Finally, I have an interest in the phenomenological movement and adjacent movements, like existentialism. These have informed my work alongside Analytic philosophy. At the University of Miami and Lebanese American University I taught a phenomenology course (from Husserl to Levinas), Nietzsche, and Levinas. Although I’m interested in all these figures, I have a particular research interest in Emmanuel Levinas, whose work remains largely unknown in analytic philosophy, and which I find insightful because of its ethical orientation. My plan is to write a book on Totality & Infinity one day.

When I’m not doing philosophy, or building something on a computer, I spend my time with either art or activism. Between 2015 and 2019 I was part of Beirut Madinati, a grass-roots political group in Beirut that ran for municipal then parliamentary elections. Our priorities included environmentally sustainable development, equality for women and other marginalized groups, religious coexistence, political transparency, accountability, and a focus on the country’s living conditions. That project, along with my time in Lebanon, have had a large impact on what I think about ethics and politics. It’s an issue that I hope to address some day in the future. In art, I particularly love the visual and performance arts. I enjoy video art, movies, video games, painting, ballroom dancing, and karate as both audience and artist. And both movies and video games, along with building Lego, are pastimes.