My primary research interests are in topics that fall into the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of language, especially where the two (at least seem to) intersect. I have published articles on origin essentialism, the sorites paradox, reference to kinds, and the paradox of flexible origin essentialism. More and more, I find myself attracted to paradoxes. I like their "clean lines": confronted with a few claims that seem intuitively plausible but that lead to contradiction, one is forced to reject an initially appealing claim. That's a situation ripe for learning something significant. Or, as Tarski put it, "In this way we have arrived at an obvious contradiction. In my judgment, it would be quite wrong and dangerous from the standpoint of scientific progress to depreciate the importance of this and other antinomies, and to treat them as jokes or sophistries. It is a fact that we are here in the presence of an absurdity, that we have been compelled to assert a false sentence … If we take our work seriously, we cannot be reconciled with this fact. We must discover its cause, that is to say, we must analyze premises upon which the antinomy is based; we must then reject at least one of these premises, and we must investigate the consequences which this has for the whole domain of our research" (Alfred Tarski, "The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (1944): 341-376, p. 348).