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1019The Mental Causation DebateAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (Supplementary): 211-36. 1995.This paper is about a puzzle which lies at the heart of contemporary physicalist theories of mind. On the one hand, the original motivation for physicalism was the need to explain the place of mental causation in the physical world. On the other hand, physicalists have recently come to see the explanation of mental causation as one of their major problems. But how can this be? How can it be that physicalist theories still have a problem explaining something which their physicalism was intended t…Read more
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2308Singular ThoughtAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1): 21-43. 2011.A singular thought can be characterized as a thought which is directed at just one object. The term ‘thought’ can apply to episodes of thinking, or to the content of the episode (what is thought). This paper argues that episodes of thinking can be just as singular, in the above sense, when they are directed at things that do not exist as when they are directed at things that do exist. In this sense, then, singular thoughts are not object-dependent.
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8780Intentionality as the mark of the mentalIn Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 229-251. 1998.‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist’.1 Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl’s phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano’s: that intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano’s originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or …Read more
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246Human Uniqueness and the Pursuit of Knowledge: a Naturalistic AccountIn Bana Bashour (ed.), Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism, . pp. 139-54. 2014.Despite the widespread acceptance of naturalism in many of the human sciences, discussions of the extent to which human beings are ‘unique’ are still common among philosophers and scientists. Cognitive ethologists and comparative psychologists often defend a standard view of this question by quoting Darwin’s famous claims in The Descent of Man that ‘there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties’ and that all the differences are ‘differences of de…Read more
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326The Autonomy of PsychologyIn Rob Wilson & Frank Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, Mit Press. 1999.Psychology has been considered to have an autonomy from the other sciences (especially physical science) in at least two ways: in its subject-matter and in its methods. To say that the subject-matter of psychology is autonomous is to say that psychology deals with entities—properties, relations, states—which are not dealt with or not wholly explicable in terms of physical (or any other) science. Contrasted with this is the idea that psychology employs a characteristic method of explanation, whic…Read more
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326Why is humour so hard to understand? Rather like attempts to explain how music can move us, attempts to explain why things are funny seem doomed from the outset. Discussions of humour typically distinguish three kinds of theory: the incongruity theory (we are amused by the incongruous), the relief theory (humour is an expression of relief in difficult situations) and the superiority theory (we laugh to express our sense of superiority over others). In the face of genuine humour, theories like th…Read more
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24El Problema de la Percepción en la Filosofía AnalíticaIn David P. Chico & Moisés Barroso Ramos (eds.), Pluralidad de la filosofía analítica, Plaza Y Valdés Editores. pp. 3--217. 2007.
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1297"A Survey of Metaphysics" by E.J. Lowe and "Metaphysics: Contemporary Readings" edited by Michael J. Loux (review)The Times Higher Education Supplement 1. 2002.Philosophy, that most misunderstood of intellectual pursuits, is often mocked; and no part of philosophy is as often mocked as metaphysics. The image of the ‘speculative metaphysician’ dreaming up abstract pictures of the world has been held up for ridicule by poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists as well as by other philosophers. The Logical Positivists in the first half of the 20th Century rejected all metaphysical speculations as ‘meaningless’ since they could not be verified by scientif…Read more
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1230Why indeed? Papineau on SupervenienceAnalysis 51 (1): 32-7. 1991.David Papineau's question, 'Why Supervenience?' [5], is a good one. The thesis that the mental supervenes on the physi- cal is widespread, but has rarely been defended by detailed argument. Believers in supervenience should be grateful to Papineau for coming to their aid; but I think they will be disappointed in the argument he gives. In what follows, I shall show that Papineau's argument for supervenience relies on a premiss that is either trivial or as contentious as supervenience itself.
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262"The Imagery Debate" by Michael Tye (review)Mind 102 (407): 535-538. 1993.Do frogs have lips? In thinking of an answer to this question, many people form a mental image of a frog and scrutinise it to find the answer. But what are they doing when they do this? The imagery debate that Michael Tye addresses in this book is between two kinds of answer to this question: the "pictorialist" answer that images are in important ways like pictures, and the "descriptionalist" answer that they are more like descriptions. Versions of these views have been held both by philosophers…Read more
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459"In Defense of Pure Reason: A Rationalist Account of A Priori Justification" by Laurence BonJour (review)Mind 112 (447): 502-6. 2003.Laurence BonJour divides approaches to a priori justification into three kinds. Quine’s radical empiricism denies the existence of any special category of a priori justification; moderate empiricism attempts to explain a priori justification in terms of something like knowledge of meaning or grasp of concepts; and rationalism postulates an irreducible ‘rational insight’ into the nature of reality. The positions therefore form a familiar trio of eliminativism, reductionism and anti-reductionism c…Read more
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20U čemu je problem opažanja?Filozofska Istrazivanja 26 (2): 257-282. 2006.Što je distinktivno filozofski problem opažanja? Ovdje se tvrdi da je to konflikt između prirode opažajnog iskustva kakva nam se intuitivno čini, te stanovitih mogućnosti koje su implicitne upravo u ideji iskustva: mogućnosti iluzije i halucinacije. Opažajno iskustvo čini nam se kao odnos prema svojim objektima, vrsta »otvorenosti prema svijetu« koja uključuje izravnu svijest postojećih objekata i njihovih svojstava. Ali ako netko može imati iskustvo iste vrste a da objekt nije tamo – halucinaci…Read more
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217Aspects of Psychologism: Précis and Reply to CriticsRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 7 (1): 96-98. 2016.Aspects of Psychologism is a collection of essays unified around a philosophical approach to the mind that is non-reductive and yet compatible (or continuous) with scientific psychology. The essays in the book, published over a period of twenty years, investigate the phenomena of intentionality and consciousness, with a special emphasis on perceptual phenomena. The central theme which unites the essays is an approach to the mind which I call ‘psychologism about the psychological’. Psychologism a…Read more
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445Names, Sense and Kripke’s PuzzleFrom the Logical Point of View 2 11-26. 1992.Frege introduced the distinction between sense and reference to account for the information conveyed by identity statements. We can put the point like this: if the meaning of a term is exhausted by what it stands for, then how can 'a =a' and 'a =b' differ in meaning? Yet it seems they do, for someone who understands all the terms involved would not necessarily judge that a =b even though they judged that a =a. It seems that 'a =b' just says something more than the trivial ’a = a' - it seems to c…Read more
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249Introduction to "Dispositions: A Debate"In D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin & Tim Crane (eds.), Dispositions: A Debate, . 1995.This book is about the nature of dispositional properties, or dispositions. It is hard to give an uncontroversial definition of the notion of a disposition, since its very definition is one of the matters under dispute. But we can make a start with the following preliminary definition: a disposition is a property (such as solubility, fragility, elasticity) whose instantiation entails that the thing which has the property would change, or bring about some change, under certain conditions. For ins…Read more
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257Michael Dummett says in the preface to his book on Frege that he is always disappointed when a book lacks a preface. ‘it is like arriving at someone’s house for dinner’ Dummett says ‘and being conducted straight into the dining room’. I feel the same way about inaugural lectures. To give an inaugural lecture is in part an acknowledgement of a professional honour, and in part an opportunity to pay a personal tribute to the institution which has honoured you in this way. It is not difficult, and …Read more
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4862The Unity of UnconsciousnessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 117 (1): 1-21. 2017.What is the relationship between unconscious and conscious intentionality? Contemporary philosophy of mind treats the contents of conscious 10 intentional mental states as the same kind of thing as the contents of un- conscious mental states. According to the standard view that beliefs and desires are propositional attitudes, for example, the contents of these states are propositions, whether or not the states are conscious or unconscious. I dispute this way of thinking of conscious and unconsci…Read more
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2144There is No Question of PhysicalismMind 99 (394): 185-206. 1990.Many philosophers are impressed by the progress achieved by physical sciences. This has had an especially deep effect on their ontological views: it has made many of them physicalists. Physicalists believe that everything is physical: more precisely, that all entities, properties, relations, and facts are those which are studied by physics or other physical sciences. They may not all agree with the spirit of Rutherford's quoted remark that 'there is physics; and there is stamp-collecting',' but …Read more
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344"The Paradox of Self-Consciousness" by José Luis Burmùdez (review)Philosophical Review 1 (4): 624. 2001.What José Luis Bermúdez calls the paradox of self-consciousness is essentially the conflict between two claims: (1) The capacity to use first-personal referential devices like “I” must be explained in terms of the capacity to think first-person thoughts. (2) The only way to explain the capacity for having a certain kind of thought is by explaining the capacity for the canonical linguistic expression of thoughts of that kind. (Bermúdez calls this the “Thought-Language Principle”.) The conflict be…Read more
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182A distinctive feature of recent popular science writing is the parade of books by distinguished scientists – from Roger Penrose to Francis Crick and Gerald Edelman – which attempt solutions to the traditional problems of mind and consciousness. The Feeling of What Happens by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio lies squarely in this tradition, as did his earlier Descartes’ Error. These books, like those of Penrose, Crick and others, attempt a difficult double task: to explain scientific results to the…Read more
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83Should Atheists be Against Religion?Think 6 (17-18): 109-119. 2008.Tim Crane responds to the several recent attacks on religion made by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.
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245"Soul-Searching" by Nicholas Humphrey (review)The Times Literary Supplement 6567 685. 2011.In 1991, Darwin College Cambridge was given a substantial bequest to fund a research post in parapsychology. The event became something of a cause célebre. Various Cambridge University academics objected to accepting this money: the professor of philosophy, D.H. Mellor, said on BBC radio that funding such a position would be like funding a research post to determine whether the earth is round. Other members of Darwin College were (understandably, perhaps) reluctant to turn down any offer of mon…Read more
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9Causation, Interpretation and Omniscience: A Note on Davidson's EpistemologyOrganon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 11 (2): 117-127. 2004.In 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', Donald Davidson argues that it is not possible for us to be massively mistaken in our beliefs. The argument is based on the possibility of an omniscient interpreter who uses the method of radical interpretation to attribute beliefs, since an omniscient interpreter who uses this method will attribute largely true beliefs to those he is inteipreting. In this paper we investigate some of the assumptions behind this argument, and we argue that these as…Read more
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Consciousness, the Awareness of the World and the Essence of the MindIn Exploring Consciousness, Fondazione Carlo Erba. pp. 35-45. 2002.
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369"I Drink Therefore I am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine" by Roger Scruton (review)Philosophy 86 (1): 138-42. 2011.Of all the things we eat or drink, wine is without question the most complex. So it should not be surprising that philosophers have turned their attention to wine: complex phenomena can lend themselves to philosophical speculation. Wine is complex not just in the variety of tastes it presents – ‘wine tastes of everything apart from grapes’, I once heard an expert say – but in its meaning...
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228"Portraits of Wittgenstein" by Ian Ground and F.A. Flowers (review)The Times Literary Supplement 1 1-1. 2016.Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993) is one of the very few films made about a philosopher’s life. Almost a parody of a late twentieth-century art-house movie, it contains a mimetic performance by Karl Johnson in the title role, plus cameos by Michael Gough (Bertrand Russell) and the ubiquitous Tilda Swinton (Russell’s lover, Ottoline Morrell). There is a green Martian (played by Nabil Shaban) who quizzes the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a collection of handsome young men sitting on deckchairs, …Read more
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1Analytic Theories of A Priori KnowledgeIn T. Childers (ed.), The Logica Yearbook, Czech Academy of Sciences. pp. 89-97. 1997.
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