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357Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality – Matthew RatcliffePhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 661-662. 2010.No Abstract
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349Review of Sosa Knowing Full Well (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 23. 2011.A review of Ernest Sosa's *Knowing Full Well* focusing on the safety/reliability contrast and the relation between knowledge and action. There are also remarks on the issue of what value knowledge adds to true belief.
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348The 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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345A solution to the donkey sentence problemAnalysis 75 (4): 554-557. 2015.The problem concerns quantifiers that seem to hover between universal and existential readings. I argue that they are neither, but a different quantifier that has features of each. NOTE the published paper has a mistake. I have corrected this in the version on this site. A correction note will appear in Analysis.
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337Consciousness ExplainedCogito 7 (2): 159-161. 1993.reviews of Dennett & McGinn on consciousness for an unsophisticated audience.
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333Can Edgington Gibbard counterfactuals?Mind 106 (421): 101-105. 1997.A criticism of Dorothy Edgington's attempt to make Gibbard's problem for indicative conditionals apply to counterfactuals.
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332I identify two components in the perception of musical pitches, which make pitch perception more like colour perception than it is usually taken to be. To back up this implausible claim I describe a programme whereby individuals can learn to identify the components in musical tones. I also claim that following this programme can affect one's pitch-recognition capacities
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329Skookumchuck, Kiidk’yaas, Gibbard: normativity, meaning, and idealizationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 148-161. 2014.I tried to tease out what Gilbert means by "normative". It isn't obvious. I conclude that assumptions about ideal agents – not just ideal in the sense of error-free but also ideal in the sense of unlimited – and assumptions about ideal placement of oneself in another person's situation, are essential to what he means. I conclude that what he says is very plausible given these assumptions, though they themselves are very problematic. Especially problematic is the idea of an unlimited simulation o…Read more
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327Book Review:Studies in Perception Peter K. Machamer, Robert G. Turnbull (review)Philosophy of Science 46 (4): 657-. 1979.
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319Double ConditionalsAnalysis 50 (2). 1990.I consider embeddings of one subjunctive conditional in the consequent of another, and argue that (if A then (if B then C)) is not equivalent to (if (A & B) then C ), given the meanings we usually give to the outer and the inner 'if'.
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317The possible in the actualNoûs 7 (4): 394-407. 1973.I give models for modal languages in which all individuals are actual.
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314Philosophy goes to the movies: An introduction to philosophyBritish Journal of Aesthetics 43 (3): 332-334. 2003.review of Falzon *Philosophy goes to the Movies*
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312Finding the corkscrewStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (1): 114-117. 2006.
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307Review of McGinn *Ethics, Evil, and Fiction* (review)The Times Literary Supplement (4946): 28-29. 1998.I try to distinguish McGinn's separation of evil from mere wrong from his aesthetic theory of morality. I argue that the combination is dangeroous.
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306Suppose, SupposeAnalysis 53 (1). 1993.I give reasons stemming from the nature of narrative thinking why two-antecedent conditionals, most naturally expressed as "Suppose A. Suppose moreover B. Then C" the two antecedents play different roles. I formalise this idea with a two-dimensional similarity relation between possible worlds.
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305Did Lewis Carroll Write Genesis?Cogito 2 (1): 12-15. 1988.I discuss the intelligibility of belief in God, presenting a neo-positivist view. It is aimed at a non-professional audience.
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304review of two similar collections on well-being.
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303Review of Mark Kaplan: Decision Theory as Philosophy (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (3): 505-507. 1999.
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299The Party-Goer's Guide to PhilosophyCogito 4 (2): 134-134. 1990.some lighthearted definitions of philosophical terms.
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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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293HypercomparativesSynthese 111 (1): 97-114. 1997.In natural language we rarely use relation-words with more than three argument places. This paper studies one systematic device, rooted in natural language, by which relations of greater adicity can be expressed. It is based on a higher-order relation between 1-place, 2-place, and 4-place relations (and so on) of which the relation between the positive and comparative degrees of a predicate is a special case. Two formal languages are presented in this connection, one of which represents the lang…Read more
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293A note on comparing death and painBioethics 2 (2). 1988.I give ways of comparing the disvalue of death and of pain by comparing each to other evils.
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285The Theory of Knowledge: Saving Epistemology from the EpistemologistsIn Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of Science Today, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 39. 2003.
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282Collective Rationality and Collective ReasoningPhilosophical Review 112 (1): 118-120. 2003.McMahon's connections between collective reasoning and collective action are real and important. I suspect that they do not go deep enough, and that far more that we usually classify as individual is in fact collective.
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277Good 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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275Lockhart’s problemThe Philosophers' Magazine 25 (30): 25-30. 2014.If we had more powerful minds would we be puzzled by less - because we could make better theories - or by more - because we could ask more difficult questions? This paper focuses on clarifying the question, with an emphasis on comparisons between actual and possible species of thinker. A pre-publication version of the paper is available on my website at http://www.fernieroad.ca/a/PAPERS/papers.html .
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269The roots of evil (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (2). 2008.a review of John Kekes' *The Roots of Evil*. I express admiration for the aims and scope of the book, and disagree with some of Kekes' accounts of some historical cases.
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251Review: If (review)Mind 115 (458): 409-412. 2006.review of Evans & Over *ifs*, a book on the psychology of conditionals.