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Dispositional propertiesIn A. R. J. Fisher & Anna-Sofia Maurin (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Properties, Routledge. 2024.
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14Dispositional PluralismIn Gregor Damschen, Robert Schnepf & Karsten Stüber (eds.), Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, De Gruyter. pp. 186-203. 2009.
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Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of MindWalter de Gruyter. 2009.
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179Causes as powers: Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum: Getting causes from powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 272pp, £35 HB (review)Metascience 22 (3): 545-559. 2013.
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204Getting Causes from Powers By Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill AnjumAnalysis 73 (2): 402-404. 2013.
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118Are Dispositions Causally Relevant?Synthese 144 (3): 357-371. 2005.To determine whether dispositions are causally relevant, we have to get clear about what causal relevance is. Several characteristics of causal relevance have been suggested, including Explanatory Power, Counterfactual Dependence, Lawfullness, Exclusion, Independence, and Minimal Sufficiency. Different accounts will yield different answers about the causal relevance of dispositions. However, accounts of causal relevance that are the most plausible, for independent reasons, render the verdict tha…Read more
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56Response to Kadri Vihvelin’s “counterfactuals and dispositions”Philosophical Studies (1): 1-4. 2012.
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10Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ISBN: 978-1350090088, $88 Hbk (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (1): 155-161. 2020.
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34Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ISBN: 978-1350090088, $88 Hbk (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 1-7. 2019.As author Christopher Prendergast acknowledges, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might have Been does not attempt to offer a theory of counterfactuals, nor does it develop a contribution to an existing theory. Instead, it is as the author puts it an “anthropology of the counterfactual”. However, it is nothing as systematic as that. It is not a survey, but a series of “listening exercises” which roam over literature, history, art, philosophy, music, and popular culture. He admits that this exercise …Read more
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46Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved?In Pieranna Garavaso (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Feminism, Bloomsbury. pp. 58-79. 2018.Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some fe…Read more
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25Real PotentialIn Kristina Engelhard & Michael Quante (eds.), Handbook of Potentiality, Springer. 2018.There's a student in my philosophy class who has "real potential." I might express this thought in any of the following ways: "She is potentially a philosopher"; "She is a potential philosopher"; "She has the potential to be a philosopher." The first way uses a cognate of "potential" as an adverb to modify "is." The second ways uses "potential" as an adjective to modify "philosopher." However, the third way uses "potential" as a noun to refer to something that the student has. What kind of thing…Read more
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13Indirect DirectnessOxford Studies in Metaphysics 10. 2017.In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll appeals to teleology to account for the way that dispositions seem to be directed toward their merely possible manifestations. He argues that his teleological account of dispositions does a better job of making sense of this directedness than rival approaches that appeal to conditional statements or physical intentionality. In this short critique, I argue that, without satisfactory clarification of a number of issues, TAD does not adequately account for…Read more
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33Dispositional Pluralism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Jennifer McKitrick offers an opinionated guide to the philosophy of dispositions. In her view, when an object has a disposition, it is such that, if a certain type of circumstance were to occur, a certain kind of event would occur. Since this is very common for this to be the case, dispositions are an abundant and diverse feature of our world.
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81Barbara Vetter: Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality: Oxford University Press, 2015, 352 pp, £52.00 , ISBN: 9780198714316Erkenntnis 84 (5): 1179-1182. 2019.
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11Reid's Foundation for the Primary/Secondary Quality DistinctionPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (209): 476-494. 2002.Reid offers an under‐appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, are unknown causes of sensations. Some may object that Reid's view is internally …Read more
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591A dispositional account of genderPhilosophical Studies 172 (10): 2575-2589. 2015.According to some philosophers, gender is a social role or pattern of behavior in a social context. I argue that these accounts have problematic implications for transgender. I suggest that gender is a complex behavioral disposition, or cluster of dispositions. Furthermore, since gender norms are culturally relative, one’s gender is partially constituted by extrinsic factors. I argue that this has advantages over thinking of gender as behavior, and has the added advantage of accommodating the po…Read more
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30Vihvelin, Kadri. Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 284. $69.00 (review)Ethics 125 (4): 1230-1236. 2015.
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136Reid's foundation for the primary/secondary quality distinctionPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (209): 478-494. 2002.Reid offers an under-appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, are unknown causes of sensations. Some may object that Reid's view is internally …Read more
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21Dispositions, causes, and reductionIn Toby Handfield (ed.), Dispositions and causes, Clarendon Press ;. 2009.Dispositionality and causation are both modal concepts which have implications not just for how things are, but for how they will be or, in some sense, must be. Some philosophers are suspicious of modal concepts and would like to make do with fewer of them.1 But what are our reductive options, and how viable are they? In this paper, I try to shut down one option: I argue that dispositions are not reducible to causes. In doing so, I try not to prejudice the issue by assuming a particular analysis…Read more
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48Establishing medical reality: Methodological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of medicine (edited book)Springer Publishing Company. 2007.This volume approaches the philosophy of medicine from the broad naturalist perspective that holds that philosophy must be continuous with, constrained by, and ...
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141 TriggersIn Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 123. 2013.
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146Introduction to Special Issue of Synthese: Dispositions and Laws of NatureSynthese 144 (3): 305-08. 2005.The Conference on Dispositions and Laws of Nature was held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in February 2003, and by all accounts was a great success. Upon seeing the program for the conference, John Symons of Synthese thought the papers would make an excellent special issue, and so here we are. Roughly speaking, dispositions are tendencies or powers—a fragile glass’s disposition to break when struck. Laws of nature, like Newton’s laws of motion, are commonly thought to be true general…Read more
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137A defense of the causal efficacy of dispositionsSATS 5 (1): 110-130. 2004.Disposition terms, such as 'cowardice,' 'fragility' and 'reactivity,' often appear in explanations. Sometimes we explain why a man ran away by saying that he was cowardly, or we explain why something broke by saying it was fragile. Scientific explanations of certain phenomena feature dispositional properties like instability, reactivity, and conductivity. And these look like causal explanations - they seem to provide information about the causal history of various events. Philosophers such as Ne…Read more
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24Review: Kadri Vihvelin, Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter (review)Ethics 125 (4): 1230-1236. 2015.
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30Dispositional PluralismIn McKitrick Jennifer (ed.), Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 186-203. 2009.In this paper, I make the case for the view that there are many different kinds of dispositions, a view I call dispositional pluralism. The reason I think that this case needs to be made is to temper the tendency to make sweeping generalization about the nature of dispositions that go beyond conceptual truths. Examples of such generalizations include claims that all dispositions are intrinsic, essential, fundamental, or natural.! In order to counter this tendency, I will start by noting the exte…Read more
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26Introduction to Establishing Medical Reality: Essays in the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Biomedical ScienceIn Harold Kincaid & Jennifer McKitrick (eds.), Establishing medical reality: Methodological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of medicine, Springer Publishing Company. pp. 1-11. 2007.Medicine has been a very fruitful source of significant issues for philosophy over the last 30 years. The vast majority of the issues discussed have been normative—they have been problems in morality and political philosophy that now make up the field called bioethics. However, biomedical science presents many other philosophical questions that have gotten relatively little attention, particularly topics in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science. This volume focuses on problems in t…Read more
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The Metaphysics of DispositionsDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1999.As Nelson Goodman put it, things are full of threats and promises. A fragile glass, for example, is prone to shatter when struck. Fragility is the glass's disposition, shattering is the manifestation of the disposition, and striking is the circumstances of manifestation. The properties of a fragile glass which are causally efficacious for shattering constitute the causal basis of the glass's fragility. The glass can remain fragile even if it never shatters. One can say of the fragile glass, with…Read more
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34Liberty, Gender, and the FamilyIn Tibor R. Machan (ed.), Liberty and Justice, Hoover Institution Press. pp. 83-103. 2006.DISCUSSIONS OF JUSTICE within the classical liberal, libertarian tradition have been universalist. They have aspired to apply to any human community, whatever the makeup of its membership. Certainly some feminists have taken issue with this, arguing that the classical liberal, libertarian understanding of justice fails to address the concerns of women, indeed, does women an injustice. Among these we find Susan Moller Okin, and it will be my task in this essay to explore whether Okin's criticism …Read more
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19Book review: Gideon yaffee, Manifest Activity: Thomas Reid's Theory of ActionJournal of Value Inquiry 39 (3-4): 513-19. 2005.Gideon Yaffee’s Manifest Activity is an important contribution to both the studies of Thomas Reid’s views and action theory. Reid is known as an early advocate of an agent-causal view of free will; more recent advocates include Roderick Chisholm. Manifest Activity is a well-appreciated effort at bringing Reid’s particular version of agent-causalism and his arguments for it into the contemporary discussion. Manifest Activity should be of interest to Reid scholars, action theorists, and anyone who…Read more
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University of Nebraska, LincolnProfessor
Lincoln, Nebraska, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Feminist Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender |