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67Sensations, experiences, and brain processesPhilosophy 45 (July): 221-6. 1970.In his defence of the identity theory, Professor Smart has attempted to show that reports of mental states are strictly topic-neutral. If this were the case then it would follow that there is nothing logically wrong with the claim that the mind is the brain or that mental states are really nothing but brain states. Some phillosophers have argued that a fundamental objection to any form of materialism is that the latter makes an obvious logical blunder in identifying the mental with the physical.…Read more
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65SubstancesHumana Mente 26 (5): 645-658. 2018.ABSTRACTThe paper takes up a conception of substances according to which substances are simple property bearers, properties being modes, particular qualitative ways individual substances are. What a substance does or would do is determined by its qualities. Efficient causation is to be understood as the manifesting of powers possessed by substances owing to their qualitative natures. Although complexes, entities with substantial parts, are not substances, they would be no less real, no less part…Read more
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88Real TablesThe Monist 88 (4): 493-509. 2005.Tables exist. You can buy tables in the local furniture mart or on the Internet; you can give your sister a table as a present; you can use a table as a weapon to fend off a prowler. The philosophical question, if there is one, is not whether tables exist but what makes it the case that tables exist.
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29Real AgencyThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 24 9-22. 2017.Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument makes salient the difficulties facing attempts to reconcile determinism and agency. Others go further. Derk Pereboom, for instance, contends that science provides compelling evidence that no action is free, and Galen Strawson argues that conditions for genuinely free action are flatly unsatisfiable. Against such skepticism about free will, the paper introduces considerations in support of the idea that there are probably good reasons to think that conditi…Read more
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399Levels of realityRatio 16 (3). 2003.Philosophers and non-philosophers have been attracted to the idea that the world incorporates levels of being: higher-level items – ordinary objects, artifacts, human beings – depend on, but are not in any sense reducible to, items at lower levels. I argue that the motivation for levels stems from an implicit acceptance of a Picture Theory of language according to which we can ‘read off’ features of the world from ways we describe the world. Abandonment of the Picture Theory opens the way to a ‘…Read more
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11Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (review)Philosophical Review 117 (1): 119-122. 2008.
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46Intentionality and the explanation of behaviorBehavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1): 146-147. 1986.
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201Hylomorphism: what’s not to like?Synthese 198 (Suppl 11): 2657-2670. 2018.The paper comprises an attempt on the part of the author to understand what hylomorphism is, both in its original Aristotelian guise, and in recent work by philosophers who defend what they call hylomorphism. Two species or strands of hylomorphism are identified and discussed. Universals, essences, and substantial and accidental forms make cameo appearances, and the implications of an Aristotelian ontology of stuffs are explored.
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3EditorialJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (1): 1--2. 2015.ABSTRACT You hold in your handsâor perhaps are viewing onlineâthe first of four issues of the inaugural volume of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. The Journal was inspired by the idea that the time had come for the American Philosophical Association to sponsor a journal serving the interests of the philosophical community worldwide, a fully generalist journal dedicated to publishing philosophically compelling articles in a timely manner
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5CausationIn Ernie Lepore & Kurt Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Blackwell. 2013.Davidson's account of mental causation initiated in “Mental Events” forms a backdrop to much subsequent discussion of the topic. Davidson is commonly taken to defend token identity – token mental events are identical with token physical events – but type diversity – mental types “supervene on,” but are not reducible to or identical with physical types, where types are understood as properties. Mental events are physical events, but one and the same event can have a physical property and, by virt…Read more
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13What is metaphysics?Polity. 2021.Metaphysics can be understood as the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality. In this textbook for students new to the topic, John Heil covers the key concepts in an original, jargon-free way.
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1Minds, Bodies and Affections: Plato and Aristotle on the Metaphysics of the MentalDissertation, The University of Texas at Austin. 1995.BAristotle introduces his hylomorphism in the De Anima not as a challenge to the immateriality of Platonic souls, but in response to a problem about the causal relationship between soul and body raised by Plato's theory of affections in the Philebus. Plato holds that mental states have a unique structure. They are characterized by what we would call intentionality and are thereby radically different in kind from physiological states . This sharp divide between the affections, however, leaves une…Read more
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75Peter Unger, all the power in the world* (oxford: Oxford university press, 2006. XXIX +640pp.) (review)Noûs 42 (2). 2008.No Abstract
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565Mental CausationStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior?…Read more
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79The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and TimePhilosophical Review 110 (1): 91. 2001.In case you hadn’t noticed, metaphysics is mounting a comeback. After decades of attempts to keep the subject at arm’s length, philosophers are discovering that progress on fundamental issues in, say, philosophy of mind, requires delving into metaphysics. Questions about the nature of minds and their contents, like those concerning free action, personal identity, or the existence of God, belong to applied metaphysics. They bear a relation to metaphysics proper analogous to the relation questions…Read more