Joshua May University of California at Santa Barbara
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  • Graduate student, University of California at Santa Barbara

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About me
I'm an ABD graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at UC Santa Barbara, working toward a PhD. I received my B.A. in philosophy from CSU Sacramento in 2005 and my M.A. and C.Phil. in philosophy from UCSB in 2008. Most of my research is in moral psychology but also: action theory, meta-ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. I'm currently Assistant to the General Editors at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a leaf editor for a couple of categories here at PhilPapers.
My works
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  1. Joshua May (forthcoming). Relational Desires and Empirical Evidence Against Psychological Egoism. European Journal of Philosophy.
    Roughly, psychological egoism is the thesis that all of a person's intentional actions are ultimately self-interested in some sense; psychological altruism is the thesis that some of a person's intentional actions are not ultimately self-interested, since some are ultimately other-regarding in some sense. C. Daniel Batson and other social psychologists have argued that experiments provide support for a theory called the "empathy-altruism hypothesis" that entails the falsity of psychological egoism. However, several critics claim that there are egoistic explanations of the (...)
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  2. Joshua May (forthcoming). Review of Experimental Philosophy Ed. By Knobe and Nichols. Philosophical Psychology.
    Experimental philosophy is a new and somewhat controversial method of philosophical inquiry in which philosophers conduct experiments in order to shed light on issues of philosophical interest. This typically involves surveying ordinary people to find out their "intuitions" (roughly, pre-theoretical judgments) about hypothetical cases important to philosophical theorizing. The controversy surrounding this methodology arises largely because it departs from more traditional ways of doing philosophy. Moreover, some of its practitioners have used it to argue that the more traditional methods are (...)
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  3. Joshua May, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jay G. Hull & Aaron Zimmerman (2010). Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical Study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2):265–273.
    In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these bank cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make in his critique of Stanley. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our intuitions about such cases are. To account for these (...)
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  4. Joshua May (2009). Review of Richard Holton's Willing, Wanting, Waiting. Metapsychology 13 (23).
    In an all too familiar part of our lives, we are sometimes strongly tempted to do things we think we shouldn’t do. Consider the burning desire to eat one of the donuts your coworker brought to work while you are on a diet. Often times we surrender to temptation. But sometimes we fight the urges and refrain—we exhibit will-power. Much of our ordinary thinking involves reference to “the will” in this sort of way. Yet for quite some time many contemporary (...)
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  5. Joshua May (2009). Review of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain by Tamler Sommers. Metapsychology 13 (53).
    A Very Bad Wizard is a collection of delightful interviews or conversations conducted by philosopher Tamler Sommers. Sommers interviews an array of researchers--from psychologists to primatologists to philosophers--who all have one thing in common: their work has direct implications for the study of morality. The distinguished interviewees are Galen Strawson, Philip Zimabrdo, Franz De Waal, Michael Ruse, Joseph Henrich, Joshua Greene, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Stich, and William Ian Miller. I read the book on my flights back to the (...)
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