Preprints / Free access
- Minimal Rationality and the Web of Questions, Unstructured Content, OUP, 2025. 🕸️
- Review of Reason and Inquiry, Mind, 2025. (journal).
- Million Dollar Questions (with Richard Bradley), Social Choice and Welfare, 2024.
- Questions in Action, J. Phil., 2022 (winner of the Levi Prize). 🎬
- Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia, Phil. of Science, 2023 (profiled in Scientific American; blog post, video, press coverage). 🍎
- Øystein vs Archimedes, Erkenntnis, 2023 (journal).
- Chance and the Continuum Hypothesis, PPR, 2021.
- Loose Talk, Scale Presuppositions and QUD. 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, 2019.
- Conversational Exculpature, Phil. Review, 2018.
I am a philosophy professor at the University of Virginia, writing about such topics as loose talk, questions, probability and infinity. Before coming to UVA, I was an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, the Louis Skolnick postdoc in philosophy at Princeton, and a PhD student at NYU under Cian Dorr. I’ve also been a visitor at the Institute for Logic Language and Computation in Amsterdam as well as the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris.
I’m currently working on a book about the inquisitive mind, exploring the role that questions play in shaping our thoughts and guiding our decision making (interview). In philosophy of language, I’m known for my theory of metaphor and loose talk as manifestations of conversational exculpature. I’ve also worked on a smattering of other topics, and received a lot of attention recently for my work on Newton’s First Law of Motion, which argues the law has been widely misunderstood (Scientific American, cool video, world-wide press coverage).
I used to help organise the wonderful New York Philosophy of Language Workshops. I love building philosophical community through department t-shirts and other means. When it’s rainy out or I can’t sleep, I enjoy trying my hand at translating Dutch children’s rhymes.In English-speaking contexts, I pronounce my last name the same way as Captain Hook’s, rhyming “Hoek” with “book” and “crook.” If you want to pronounce it the Dutch way, use a longer “oo” sound, so that “Dr. Hoek” becomes “Dr. Who” with a K appended at the end. (And if you pronounce it any other way, that’s also fine: I’m not particular about it.)