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63The Impossibility of Natural NecessityIn Alexander Carruth, Sophie Gibb & John Heil (eds.), Ontology, Modality, and Mind: Themes from the Metaphysics of E.J. Lowe, Oxford University Press. pp. 73-92. 2018.I build a case for the impossibility of natural necessity as anything other than a species of metaphysical necessity – the necessity obtaining in virtue of the essences of natural objects. Aristotelian necessitarianism about the laws of nature is clarified and defended. I contrast it with E.J. Lowe’s contingentism about the laws. I examine Lowe’s solution to the circularity/triviality problem besetting natural necessity understood as relative necessity. Lowe’s way out is subject to serious probl…Read more
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78The Ethics of Co-operation in WrongdoingRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 54 203-227. 2004.There are a number of ways in which a person can share the guilt of another's wrongdoing. He might advise it, command it or consent to it. He might provoke it, praise it, flatter the wrongdoer, or conceal the wrong. He might stay silent when there is a clear duty to denounce the wrong or its perpetrator; or he might positively defend the wrong done. Finally, he might actively participate or cooperate in the wrongdoing. These various activities, apart from cooperation, typically occur before or a…Read more
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216Temporal Parts and the Possibility of ChangePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (3): 686-708. 2004.Things change. If anything counts as a datum of metaphysics, that does. Change occurs in many ways: it can be accidental or substantial; essential or non-essential; intrinsic or extrinsic; subjective or objective. Changes can be physical, spatial, quantitative, qualitative, natural, artefactual, conceptual, linguistic. Events are arguably best defined as changes in an object or objects. All change is from something and into something, and hence is at least a two-term relation, involving a term f…Read more
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94Graph structuralism and its discontents: rejoinder to ShackelAnalysis 72 (1): 94-98. 2012.Nicholas Shackel (2011) has proposed a number of arguments to save the Dipert–Bird model of physical reality from the sorts of unpalatable consequence I identified in Oderberg 2011. Some consequences, he thinks, are only apparent; others are real but palatable. In neither case does he seem to me to have deflected the concerns I raised, leaving graph structuralism on Dipert–Bird lines as problematic as ever
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53Temporal Parts and the Possibility of ChangePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (3): 686-708. 2004.Things change. If anything counts as a datum of metaphysics, that does. Change occurs in many ways: it can be accidental or substantial; essential or non-essential; intrinsic or extrinsic; subjective or objective. Changes can be physical, spatial, quantitative, qualitative, natural, artefactual, conceptual, linguistic. Events are arguably best defined as changes in an object or objects. All change is from something and into something, and hence is at least a two-term relation, involving a term f…Read more
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49Disembodied Communication and Religious Experience: The Online ModelPhilosophy and Technology 25 (3): 381-397. 2012.Abstract The idea of disembodied communication has received widespread discussion in the context of the various kinds of online interaction. Electronic mail is probably the purest form of text-based communication where interlocutors are present in mind rather than body. I argue that this online model provides a way of understanding and defending the possibility of a certain kind of public religious experience, contra the many critics of the very coherence of genuine religious experience. I int…Read more
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97Flat Error: Review of Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth (review)Quadrant. 1993.A review of Jeffrey Burton Russell's book that demonstrates conclusively that the idea the earth was flat is a founding myth in the history of science. Hardly *any* scholar ever believed it.
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165in J. Haldane (ed.), Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002: 125-42).
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56Reply to Sprigge on personal and impersonal identityMind 98 (January): 129-133. 1989.In "personal and impersonal identity" ("mind", 1988) timothy sprigge discusses reasons for a general suspicion of trans-temporal identity, and rejects what he says are the usual grounds given against the suspicion, providing instead his own reasons for rejecting it. he concludes that trans-temporal identity, including personal identity, is as genuine a case of identity as what he considers to be the paradigmatic case of identity. in this brief note i take issue with some of the basic elements of…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |