Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Toronto
Areas of Interest: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Language
Personal Homepage: http://www.jonathandpayton.com/
Email: jonathanpayton@bilkent.edu.tr
Phone: +90-312-290-2722
Office: H-242
About
Jonathan D. Payton joined the department in 2020. Previously, he held a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which he undertook at the University of Calgary. He completed his PhD in philosophy in 2016 at the University of Toronto. He works on topics in metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of language. Interests include the nature of negative actions (intentional omissions, refrainments, etc.), the metaphysics of parts and wholes, and the logic and semantics of plural constructions. He has published in such journals as Analysis, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and Synthese. In 2021 he published his first book, Negative Actions: Events, Absences, and the Metaphysics of Agency, with Cambridge University Press (book review). In 2024 he was the recipient of the Distinguished Young Scientist award (BAGEP). When not doing philosophy, he enjoys relaxing with a good book, a good film, or some good music (the heavier and more metallic, the better).
Sample publications
Payton, J. (2021). Negative Actions: Events, Absences, and the Metaphysics of Agency. Cambridge University Press. [book review by William Hornett]
Payton, J. (forthcoming). Collective nouns and the distribution problem. Synthese. (with D. Nicolas)
Payton, J. (forthcoming). Divided agency, manipulation, and regret. Journal of Social Ontology.
Payton, J. (2023). On what there is in particular. Analysis. 83 (1): 70-79.
Payton, J. (2023). Mereological destruction and relativized parthood: A reply to Costa and Calosi. Erkenntnis, 88 (4): 1797-1806.
Payton, J. (2022). Counting composites. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 100(4): 695-710
Payton, J. (2022). Composition and Plethological Innocence. Analysis, 82 (1): 67-74.
Payton, J. (2022). Two problems for the constitution view of omissions: A reply to Palmer. Erkenntnis, 87 (3): 1447-1455.
Payton, J. (2022). Attempts. Philosophical Studies, 179 (2): 363-382.
Payton, J. (2021). Composition as identity, now with all the pluralities you could want. Synthese. 199 (3-4): 8047-8068
Payton, J. (2021). How to identify wholes with their parts. Synthese 198 (Suppl. 18): 4571–4593.
Payton, J. (2018). How to identify negative actions with positive events. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1): 87–101.
Payton, J. (2016). The logical form of negative action sentences. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 46(6): 855–876.