•  150
    1. Consider a circle. It has both a radius and a circumference. There is obviously a real distinction between the properties having a radius and having a circumference. This is not because, when confining ourselves to circles,1 having a radius can ever exist apart from having a circumference. A real distinction does not depend on that. Descartes thought that a real distinction between x and y meant that x could exist without y or vice versa, if only by the power of God. But Descartes was wrong. …Read more
  •  17
    Concepts, dualism, and the human intellect
    In Alessandro Antonietti, Antonella Corradini & E. Jonathan Lowe (eds.), Psycho-Physical Dualism Today: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Lexington Books. pp. 211--33. 2008.
  •  117
    In this essay, I first set out the principles of change, paying particular attention to the need for a support for all changes and to the need for prime matter. I then discuss the nature of time, arguing that time is not actually composed of durationless instants but that instants can be understood as limits to an infinite process of potential division. I then give a definition of instants in terms of intervals and propose a way of modeling them. In the next section I bring together the two previou…Read more
  •  2958
    This article challenges the view most recently expounded by Emily Jackson that ‘decisional privacy’ ought to be respected in the realm of artificial reproduction (AR). On this view, it is considered an unjust infringement of individual liberty for the state to interfere with individual or group freedom artificially to produce a child. It is our contention that a proper evaluation of AR and of the relevance of welfare will be sensitive not only to the rights of ‘commissioning parties’ to AR but a…Read more
  •  20
    Some Problems of Identity over Time
    Cogito 5 (1): 14-20. 1991.
  •  53
    This is a series of essays critical of the utilitarian bioethics now dominating contemporary discussion. Analysing questions of moral theory as well as applied ethics this book aims to supply essays on matters as diverse as beginning and end-of-life issues as well as animal rights, the act-omission distinction and the principle of double effect in caring in medical ethics.
  •  4
    Foreword
    The Monist 89 (4): 439-441. 2006.
  • Moral Theory
    Mind 110 (438): 531-534. 2001.
  •  53
    Temporal Parts and the Possibility of Change
    Philosophy 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
  •  49
    Disembodied Communication and Religious Experience: The Online Model
    Philosophy 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
  •  98
  •  7
    Causing Actions (review)
    Philosophy 78 (1): 123-145. 2003.
  • Human Values: New Essays on Ethics and Natural Law
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (226): 117-122. 2007.
  •  97
    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.
  •  56
    Reply to Sprigge on personal and impersonal identity
    Mind 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
  •  165
    in J. Haldane (ed.), Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002: 125-42).
  •  93
    This is an introductory talk on why I am not a consequentialist. I am not going to go into the details of consequentialist theory, or to compare and contrast different versions of consequentialism. Nor am I going to present all the reasons I am not a consequentialist, let alone all the reasons why you should not be one. All I want to do is focus on some key problems that in my view, and the view of many others, make consequentialism a totally unacceptable moral theory – a theory about what is ri…Read more
  •  35
    Embryo Experimentation (review)
    Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 33 276-283. 1991.
  •  15
    Mind‐Body Identity Theories (review)
    Philosophical Books 32 (1): 45-47. 1991.
  •  41
    The Old New Logic: Essays on the Philosophy of Fred Sommers (edited book)
    Bradford/MIT Press. 2005.
    Over the course of a career that has spanned more than fifty years, philosopher Fred Sommers has taken on the monumental task of reviving the development of Aristotelian (syllogistic) logic after it was supplanted by the predicate logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. The enormousness of Sommers's undertaking can be gauged by the fact that most philosophers had come to believe - as David S. Oderberg writes in his preface - that "Aristotelian logic was good but is now as good as dead." A r…Read more
  •  17
    Classifying Reality (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
    Distinguished metaphysicians examine issues central to the high-profile debate between philosophers over how to classify the natural world, and discuss issues in applied ontology such as the classification of diseases. Leading metaphysicians explore fundamental questions related to the classification and structure of the natural world An essential commentary on issues at the heart of the contemporary debate between philosophy and science Interweaves discussion of overarching themes with detailed…Read more
  •  313
    You might be wondering what an article 0n animal rights is doing in a journal devoted to the defence of human life. It turns out that the connections are closer than you may think. Grasping them is crucial to a proper understanding of just why innocent human life must be defended, of why the killing of even the tiniest, youngest member of the human species is an unspeakable crime. For it is by analysing the issue of whether animals have rights that we come to see the core differences between hum…Read more
  •  102
    l. ln `“Time, Successive Addition. and Kn/uni Cosmological Arguments," Graham Oppy accuses supporters ofthe KCA of being committed to a strict Hnitist metaphysics. lfthis is supposed to mean that we deny continua in nature, that is quite wrong. All it means is that we deny the existence of actual intinities. ln fact, Oppy protesses not to be tackling that question but throughout his paper he suggests or implies that the KCA falls down on this score.