I have edited or co-edited three special issues of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

My research is on issues at the intersection of belief, agency and rationality.

My publications are all listed on PhilPeople. 

My book Sortal Quality: pleasure, desire, and moral worth, was published in September 2025 with Oxford University Press.

Abstract: Our world is rich in things of varying degrees of quality. This book argues that sortal quality, what others have called goodness of a kind, is the fundamental evaluative notion. It shows how it is woven into the most fundamental parts of our cognitive, emotional, and practical lives. It explains how people can identify a sortal's standards of quality and figure out how a thing measures up. It argues that sortal quality is a primary source of pleasure, showing how pleasure is a cognitive response to sortal quality. Even sensory pleasure, it argues, is tied to sortal quality. But people don't just discern and enjoy sortal quality, they also bear it. They are good in some respects and not so good in others. The book shows how a person's desires are grounded in sortal quality and how rational action is under its guise. It explains how the idea of a morally good person can be understood as a case of sortal quality, and how this grounds moral emotions like shame and resentment. By tracing how sortal quality sits at the heart of our moral psychology, the book shows how our world can be rich in sortal quality--including moral quality--even if nothing is intrinsically good or has absolute value. Those traditional evaluative notions, the book argues, are not needed to understand normativity and the roles it plays in our lives.

My book On Believing: being right in a world of possibilities, was published in May 2022 with Oxford University Press.

ABSTRACT: This book offers a new theory of the nature, limits, and norms of belief. To believe something is to be in position to do, think, and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argue that belief states are not abilities, dispositions or causal powers. Rather, believing makes a difference to the reasons we have to exercise and manifest our capacities and dispositions. While we are right or wrong in believing something, believing is not a form of representing. The objects of belief are ways things are or could have been, not representations of such ways, and belief states are not themselves true or false. There are limits to what we can believe, set by who we are and by what is possible. They give rise to credal illusions and ground the essential subjectivity of belief. Through voluntary acts of inference we become responsible for believing what we do. Believing something is to our credit when it shows that we are good in some respect, but what we ought to believe depends on what we ought to know, and this in turn on what we ought to do and think, and not on the evidence we have. To understand the nature of belief, I argue, we must resist the temptation to hypostasize belief states, and instead put the believer at the heart of the story. ​

David Hunter