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282Good citizens and moral heroesIn Pedro Alexis Tabensky (ed.), The positive function of evil, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.Scale matters in morality, so that different factors occupy us at high and low scales. Different people are needed to be good neighbours in everyday life and moral heroes in crises. There is no reason to believe that the same traits are required for both. So there is no such thing as the all-round good person.
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140Frames of Mind: Constraints on the Common-sense Conception of the MentalOxford University Press USA. 1980.I argue that general constraints on how humans think about humans produce universal features of the concept of mind. Some of these constraints determine how we imagine other people's thinking and action through our own. I formulate this in opposition to what I call the "theory theory". I believe this was the first use of this terminology, and this work was an early version of what has come to be called the simulation theory.
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665Emotional Truth. By Ronald de Sousa. (Oxford UP, 2011. Pp. xviii + 391. Price £38.00.)Philosophical Quarterly 62 (246): 220-222. 2012.
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149Empathy for the DevilIn Amy Coplan & Peter Goldie (eds.), Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 318. 2011.I argue that there is a blinkering effect to decency. Being a morally sensitive person, and having internalized a code of behavior that restricts the range of actions that one takes as live options for oneself, constrains one’s imagination. It becomes harder to identify imaginatively with mportant parts of human possibility. In particular—the part of the claim that I will argue for in this chapter—it limits one’s capacity to empathize with those who perform atrocious acts. They become alien to o…Read more
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242Damage, flourishing, and two sides of moralityEshare: An Iranian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1). forthcoming.I explore how considerations about psychological damage connect with moral theories.
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20This paper connects Turiel's discovery that small children distinguish between moral and conventional norms with the theory of mind debate and with contemporary work in moral philosophy. My aim is to explain both why pre-schoolers can easily make a moral/conventional distinction, and why at some later age it becomes harder to grasp such a distinction. My answer, in a nutshell, is that there is a simple moral/conventional distinction that is well within the capabilities of very small children, bu…Read more
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64Central and Marginal Forgiveness: Comments on Charles Griswold’s Forgiveness; a Philosophical ExplorationPhilosophia 38 (3): 439-444. 2010.I discuss Charles Griswold’s Forgiveness, arguing that he classifies as marginal many cases that we normally count as forgiveness. Moreover the phenomenon that he calls “forgiveness at its best” may include some awful aspects of human nature. Nevertheless, there are central and important aspects of the concept that are captured by his discussion
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295A Guide Through the Theory of KnowledgeWiley-Blackwell. 1997.The third edition of this highly acclaimed text is ideal for introductory courses in epistemology. Assuming little or no philosophical knowledge, it guides beginning students through the landmarks in epistemology, covering historically important topics as well as current issues and debates
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312review of two similar collections on well-being.
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152I_— _Ronald de SousaAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 247-263. 2002.Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like stat…Read more
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121Review: Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (review)Mind 115 (459): 777-780. 2006.
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709The Value of a PersonAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 68 (1). 1994.(for Adam Morton's half) I argue that if we take the values of persons to be ordered in a way that allows incomparability, then the problems Broome raises have easy solutions. In particular we can maintain that creating people is morally neutral while killing them has a negative value.
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360The Future for Philosophy - Edited by Brian Leiter (review)Philosophical Books 47 (4): 366-368. 2006.review of Brian Leiter's collection *The Future for Philosophy*
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57A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume 1, by Ernest SosaMind 118 (472): 1180-1183. 2009.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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187Great expectationsIn Tim Lewens (ed.), Risk: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2007.I distinguish between risks in which most people will do badly from those in which few will, though some will do very badly.
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2Why there is no concept of a personIn Christopher Gill (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 1990.(written years later) I argue that the schematic concept of a person as found in discussions of personal identity could not be used by real humans of themselves, and is not much of a guide for imagining possible beings. Issues of demonstrative self-knowledge play a large role in the argument.
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223Why there is no concept of a person. in Gill, ed. *the person and the human mind*:In Christopher Gill (ed.), Ancient and Modern Philosophy, Clarendon Press. 1989.I argue that the Frankfurtian concept of a person ignored the indexical 'I'
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1624An introductory logic textbook where the central concept is not deduction but search and logical form. (Deduction - logical consequence - drops out as a special case. TIt is meant for a class-based rather than a lecture-based course, and for students with general interests.
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53The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives (review)The Monist 85 (2): 337-338. 2002.Amélie Rorty has put together a wonderfully varied collection of writings, with a range in time of three thousand years and a range of style from sacred writings to fiction to analytical philosophy. There is nothing like it in print, and it will be an invaluable source for many of us. The writings she has collected are all about—well, I’m not sure that there is something that they are all about. The title suggests that the collection is about a phenomenon called Evil that has many faces: one und…Read more
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149describes connections between a series of related papers
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168Damage and imaginationThe Junkyard (Blog). 2017.Many morally important facts about the way we affect one another, in particular the psychological damage we can inflict, are hard to imagine .
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402Cousins of RegretIn Gottlieb Anna (ed.), the moral psychology of regret, . forthcoming.I classify emotions in the family of regret, remorse, and so on, in such a way that it is easy to see how there can be further emotions in this family, for which we happened not to have names in English. I describe some of these emotions.
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376The Presidential Address: Where Demonstratives Meet Vagueness: Possible LanguagesProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (1). 1999.I present three invented languages, in order to support a claim that vagueness and demonstrativity are related. One of them handles vagueness like English handles demonstratives, the second handles demonstratives like English handles vagueness, and the third combines the resources of the first two. The argument depends on the claim that all three can be learned and used by anyone who can speak English.
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6Freudian commonsenseIn Richard Wollheim & James Hopkins (eds.), Philosophical Essays on Freud, Cambridge University Press. 1982.I discuss aspects of Freudian theory that have entered folk psychology
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458Because he thought he had insulted himJournal of Philosophy 72 (1): 5-15. 1975.I compare our idioms for quantifying into belief contexts to our idioms for quantifying into intention contexts. The latter is complicated by the fact that there is always a discrepancy between the action as intended and the action as performed. The article contains - this is written long after it appeared - an early version of a tracking or sensitivity analysis of the relation between a thought and its object.
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54110 The evolution of strategic thinkingIn Peter Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge University Press. pp. 218. 2000.I discuss ways in which innate human psychology facilitates the quasi-game-theoretical reasoning required for group life.
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100Emotion and ImaginationPolity. 2013.I argue that on an understanding of imagination that relates it to an individual's environment rather than her mental contents imagination is essential to emotion, and brings together affective, cognitive, and representational aspects to emotion. My examples focus on morally important emotions, especially retrospective emotions such as shame, guilt, and remorse, which require that one imagine points of view on one's own actions. PUBLISHER'S BLURB: Recent years have seen an enormous amount of phi…Read more
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433Mathematical Modelling and Contrastive ExplanationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 20 (Supplement): 251-270. 1990.Mathematical models provide explanations of limited power of specific aspects of phenomena. One way of articulating their limits here, without denying their essential powers, is in terms of contrastive explanation.