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17Fear and IntegrityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 38 (1): 31-49. 2008.I'll begin this paper with an autobiographical example — an instance of a common enough kind of case involving agents who are faced with making a choice they strongly care about, but who have tendencies that incline them towards choosing an option they prefer not to choose. Later in the paper, I apply some of the general lessons learned from this case to a philosophically more familiar example of a hard-to-make choice, and to the well-known problem the example generates for the idea of rational …Read more
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The Fiction of CreationismIn Franck Lihoreau (ed.), Truth in Fiction, Ontos Verlag. pp. 38--203. 2010.
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413Causal descriptivismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 65 (1). 1987.This Article does not have an abstract
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52Plantinga on God, freedom, and evilInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (2). 1981.
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138Millian descriptivismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (4). 2004.Mill is a detractor of the view that proper names have meanings, defending in its place the view that names are nothing more than (meaningless) marks. Because of this, Mill is often regarded as someone who anticipated the theory of direct reference for names: the view that the only contribution a name makes to propositions expressed through its use is the name's referent. In this paper I argue that the association is unfair. With some gentle interpretation, Mill can be portrayed as someone who i…Read more
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Intending and ImaginingIn Henrik Lagerlund, Sten Lindström & Rysiek Sliwinski (eds.), Modality Matters: Twenty-Five Essays in Honour of Krister Segerberg, Uppsala Philosophical Studies 53. pp. 53--247. 2006.
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36The Philosophy of Information – By Luciano FloridiJournal of Applied Philosophy 29 (1): 86-88. 2012.
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10Review: William S. Hatcher, The Logical Foundations of Mathematics; William S. Hatcher, Foundations of Mathematics; William Hatcher's, Logical Foundations of Mathematics (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 51 (2): 467-470. 1986.
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33Beyond Belief? A Critical Study of Graham Priest's Beyond the Limits of Thought'Theoria 67 (2): 140-53. 2001.
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44Parts and PretensePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 543-560. 2001.This paper begins with a puzzle about certain temporal expressions: phrases like ‘Jones as he was ten years ago’ and ‘the Jones of ten years ago’. There are reasons to take these as substantival, to be interpreted as terms for temporal parts. But it seems that the same reifying strategy would also force us to countenance a host of less attractive posits, among them fictional counterparts of real things (to correspond to such phrases as ‘Garrison as he was in the movie JFK') and much more. I argu…Read more
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106Much ado about nothing: Priest and the reinvention of noneism (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1). 2008.
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277Was meinong only pretending?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (3): 499-527. 1992.In this paper I argue against the usual interpretation of\nMeinong's argument for nonexistent objects, an\ninterpretation according to which Meinong imported\nnonexistent objects like "the golden mountain" to account\ndirectly for the truth of statements like the golden\nmountain is golden'. I claim instead (using evidence from\nMeinong's "On Assumptions") that his argument really\ninvolves an ineliminable appeal to the notion of pretense.\nThis appeal nearly convinced Meinong at one stage that …Read more
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250Fictionalism in MetaphysicsPhilosophy Compass 6 (11): 786-803. 2011.This is a survey of contemporary work on ‘fictionalism in metaphysics’, a term that is taken to signify both the place of fictionalism as a distinctive anti‐realist metaphysics in which usefulness rather than truth is the norm of acceptance, and the fact that philosophers have given fictionalist treatments of a range of specifically metaphysical notions
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30Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob FregePhilosophical Studies (Dublin) 29 290-291. 1982.
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58Characterizing Non-existentsGrazer Philosophische Studien 51 (1): 163-193. 1996.Consider predicates like 'is a fictional character' and 'is a mythical object'. Since their ascription entails a corresponding Negative Existential claim, call these 'NE-characterizing predicates'. Objectualists such as Parsons, Sylvan, van Inwagen, and Zalta think that NE-characterizing properties are genuine properties of genuinely non-existent objects. But how, then, to make room for statements like 'Vulcan is a failed posit' and 'that little green man is a trick of the light'? The predicates…Read more
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2A Realistic Theory of Categories (review)Dialogue 38 (2): 417-419. 1999.Roderick Chisholm’s Essay looks beguilingly simple. It is a short work, written in a simple, unaffected style. There is, of course, the usual crop of technical definitions, but these should not daunt the reader. Chisholm makes it easy enough, for the most part, to see what motivates his formulations, and he makes it easy for his readers to see how his concerns and solutions compare with those of some other important philosophers.
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79Quantified negative existentialsDialectica 57 (2). 2003.This paper suggests that quantified negative existentials about fiction—statements of the form “There are some / many / etc. Fs in work W who don't exist”—offer a serious challenge to the theorist of fiction: more serious, in a number of ways, that singular negative existentials. I argue that the temptation to think that only a realist semantics of such statements is plausible should be resisted. There are numerous quantified negative existentials found in other areas that seem equally “true” bu…Read more
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35Mind, Ethics, and Conditionals: Themes from the Philosophy of Frank JacksonAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (2). 2011.Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 89, Issue 2, Page 367-370, June 2011
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University of AucklandDepartment of Philosophy
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
General Philosophy of Science |