I am Tony Tomasi, a first year PhD student. I am from New Brighton, PA, just right outside of Pittsburgh. Before attending University of Tennessee, I held multiple adjunct instructor positions after earning my master’s degree in 2020. I taught in person at Penn State University (Beaver New Kensington campuses), while teaching a combination of synchronous Zoom courses and asynchronous courses at Columbia State Community College, Germanna Community College, and Northwest State Community College.  

I am interested in philosophy of mind, including consciousness and moral agency, perception and self-knowledge, and the relationship of knowledge and being. Does perception give us direct access to reality, or is reality mediated by cognition? If the latter, how do we access this mediating cognition itself while avoiding a regress? And if cognition is part of reality, in what sense does its mediated nature distinguish it from reality as such? 

My interests in ethical theory include moral epistemology, Aristotelian and Kantian ethics, and ethics for AI. Assuming the creation of such an entity is metaphysically possible, I ask whether we have a moral obligation to refrain from creating a self-aware, critically reasoning AI—which presumably entails moral status—on the grounds that its existence would necessarily entail subjugation: either of them or us. 

 In metaphysics, I am interested in the ontology of value and in the philosophy of life. Is goodness the foundation for all further evaluations? If goodness is not a real predicate and merely attributive, how does this shape all other accounts of value and the goodness of life itself?