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Philosophical problems of biologyIn Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford companion to philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 97. 1995.
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41Ll The poverty of conceptual analysisIIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. pp. 166. 2013.
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71Can we be harmed after we are dead?Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 18 (5): 1091-1094. 2012.
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Pysicalism and the human sciencesIn Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (ed.), Philosophy of the social sciences: philosophical theory and scientific practice, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
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442Mind the gapPhilosophical Perspectives 12 373-89. 1998.On the first page of The Problem of Consciousness , Colin McGinn asks "How is it possible for conscious states to depend on brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology arise from soggy grey matter?" Many philosophers feel that questions like these pose an unanswerable challenge to physicalism. They argue that there is no way of bridging the "explanatory gap" between the material brain and the lived world of conscious experience , and that physicalism about the mind can therefore provide no …Read more
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150Reply to Kirk and MelnykSWIF Philosophy of Mind 4 (1). 2003.I am lucky to have two such penetrating commentators as Robert Kirk and Andrew Melnyk. It is also fortunate that they come at me from different directions, and so cover different aspects of my book. Robert Kirk has doubts about the overall structure of my enterprise, and in particular about my central commitment to a distinctive species of phenomenal concepts. Andrew Melnyk, by contrast, offers no objections to my general brand of materialism. Instead he focuses specifically on my discussion of …Read more
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5Introducing ConsciousnessTotem Books. 2000.This title is now available in a new format. Refer to Consciousness: A Graphic Guide 9781848311718.
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324Theories of consciousnessIn Quentin Smith & Aleksandar Jokić (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 353. 2003.My target in this paper is "theories of consciousness". There are many theories of consciousness around, and my view is that they are all misconceived. Consciousness is not a normal scientific subject, and needs handling with special care. It is foolhardy to jump straight in and start building a theory, as if consciousness were just like electricity or chemical valency. We will do much better to reflect explicitly on our methodology first. When we do this, we will see that theories of consciousn…Read more
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1Laws and AccidentsIn Graham Macdonald & Crispin Wright (eds.), Fact, Science and Morality: Essays on A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, Blackwell. 1987.
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150Many Minds are No Worse than OneBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (2): 233-241. 1996.
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13Does your dog know when it is time for walkies, even if you are in a different room when you decide to take it out? Can you sometimes tell that you are being stared at, even when your kibitzer is some distance away and completely hidden? If so, Rupert Sheldrake (www.sheldrake.org) would like to hear from you. He has compiled a database of over 5,000 such cases, and would be glad to learn of any more.
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37There is No Trace of Any Soul Linked to the BodyIn Keith Augustine & Michael Martin (eds.), The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life After Death, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 369-376. 2015.This paper argues that all apparently special forces characteristically reduce to a few fundamental physical forces which conserve energy and operate throughout nature. Consequently, there are probably no special mental forces originating from souls and acting upon bodies and brains in addition to the basic, energy-conserving physical forces. Moreover, physiological and biochemical research have failed to uncover any evidence of forces over and above the basic physical forces acting on living bo…Read more
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9Normativity and JudgementAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 17-61. 1999.[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativi…Read more
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Does the sociology of science discredit science?In Robert Nola (ed.), Relativism and Realism in Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 37-57. 1988.
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4The Causal Closure of the Physical and NaturalismIn Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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60Mathematical fictionalismInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (2). 1988.No abstract
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10The Structure of Social Science. A Philosophical Introduction By Michael Lessnoff London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974, 173 pp., £3.60 cloth, £1.85 paperback (review)Philosophy 50 (193): 364-. 1975.
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332Causation is macroscopic but not irreducibleIn Sophie Gibb, E. J. Lowe & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 126. 2013.In this paper I argue that causation is an essentially macroscopic phenomenon, and that mental causes are therefore capable of outcompeting their more specific physical realizers as causes of physical effects. But I also argue that any causes must be type-identical with physical properties, on pain of positing inexplicable physical conspiracies. I therefore allow macroscopic mental causation, but only when it is physically reducible
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |