University of Queensland
School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
PhD, 2005
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy
Metaphysics
  •  210
    Our Naïve Representation of Time and of the Open Future
    with Batoul Hodroj and Andrew J. Latham
    Dialectica. forthcoming.
    It’s generally thought that we naively or pre-theoretically represent the future to be open. While philosophers have modelled future openness in different ways, it’s unclear which, if any, captures our naïve sense that the future is open. In this paper we focus on just one way the future might count as being open: by being nomically open, and empirically investigate whether our naïve representation of the future as open is partly constituted by representing the future as nomically open. We also …Read more
  •  208
    Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects pe…Read more
  •  207
    Pure and Impure Time Preferences
    Australasian Philosophical Review 5 (3): 277-283. 2021.
    This paper investigates two assumptions of the exponential discounted utility theory (EDU) to which Callender draws our attention: namely that we can cleanly distinguish pure from impure temporal preferences, and that past discounting can be ignored. Drawing on recent empirical work in this area, we argue that in so far as one might have thought that past-directed preferences are more pure than future ones, then there is evidence that people’s pure preferences (in so far as we can make sense of …Read more
  •  206
    Presentism, Passage, Phenomenology and Physicalism
    Manuscrito 39 (4): 183-201. 2016.
    ABSTRACT Temporal dynamists argue that we should believe that there exists temporal passage because there being passage is the best explanation for the presence of our temporal phenomenology. Presentists argue that presentism is the best version of temporal dynamism. Therefore, conditional on us accepting temporal dynamism, we should accept presentism. In this paper it is argued that if we understand temporal passage as the presentist does, such an argument can succeed only if dualism is true. T…Read more
  •  205
    Pretence Fictionalism about the Non-Present
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1. 2021.
    Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true…Read more
  •  204
    All else being equal, most of us typically prefer to have positive experiences in the future rather than the past and negative experiences in the past rather than the future. Recent empirical evidence tends not only to support the idea that people have these preferences, but further, that people tend to prefer more painful experiences in their past rather than fewer in their future (and mutatis mutandis for pleasant experiences). Are such preferences rationally permissible, or are they, as time-…Read more
  •  203
    Defending contingentism in metaphysics
    Dialectica 63 (1): 23-49. 2009.
    Metaphysics is supposed to tell us about the metaphysical nature of our world: under what conditions composition occurs; how objects persist through time; whether properties are universals or tropes. It is near orthodoxy that whichever of these sorts of metaphysical claims is true is necessarily true. This paper looks at the debate between that orthodox view and a recently emerging view that claims like these are contingent, by focusing on the metaphysical debate between monists and pluralists a…Read more
  •  200
    Backwards Causation, Time, and the Open Future
    Metaphysica 9 (2): 173-191. 2008.
    Here are some intuitions we have about the nature of space and time. There is something fundamentally different about the past, present, and future. What is definitive of the past is that the past events are fixed. What is definitive of the future is that future events are not fixed. What is definitive of the present is that it marks the objective ontological border between the past and the future and, by doing so, instantiates a particularly salient phenomenological property of nowness. Call th…Read more
  •  197
    What is an Ersatz Part?
    New Content is Available for Grazer Philosophische Studien 94 (4): 524-551. 2017.
    This paper develops four proposals for explicating the notion of an ersatz part. It then evaluates each proposal with respect to a number of jobs for which ersatz parts are posited. We argue that each of the four notions of ersatz parthood do better with respect to some jobs, and worse with respect to others. Thus, we think, it’s horses for courses: which notion of ersatz part one chooses will be sensitive to which metaphysical project one is pursuing.
  •  186
    Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will be pain pumped. Thus, com…Read more
  •  185
    It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empiri…Read more
  •  183
    Commentary: Physical time within human time
    with Danqi Wang
    Frontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.
    Gruber et al. (2022) and Buonomano and Rovelli (Forthcoming) aim to render Q18 consistent the picture of time delivered to us by physics, with the way time seems to us in experience. Their general approach is similar; they take the picture of our world given to us in physics, a picture on which there is no global “moving” present and hence no robust temporal flow, and attempt to explain why things nevertheless seem to us as they do, given that our world is that way. In this, they follow in the f…Read more
  •  182
    Dating - Philosophy for Everyone: Flirting with Big Ideas (edited book)
    with Marlene Clark
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2010.
    Progressing from the first flirtatious moment of eye contact to the selection of a “mate,” this enlightening book offers playful philosophical explorations of the dating game for anyone who has dated, is dating, or intends to date again. Offers amusing and enlightening philosophical insights into the dating game Helps demystify coupling in the 21 st century for those young daters just entering the fray, and those veterans returning to the game Features contributions from a wide range of discipli…Read more
  •  181
    Exploring Arbitrariness Objections to Time-Biases
    with Andrew J. Latham, Jordan Oh, Sam Shpall, and Wen Yu
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association. forthcoming.
    There are two kinds of time-bias: near-bias and future-bias. While philosophers typically hold that near-bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future-bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been levelled against both near-bias and future-bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. I…Read more
  •  153
    This paper has two aims. First, to bring together the models of temporal phenomenology on offer and to present these using a consistent set of distinctions and terminologies. Second, to examine the methodologies currently practiced in the development of these models. To that end we present an abstract characterisation in which we catalogue all extant models. We then argue that neither of the two extreme methodologies currently discussed is suitable to the task of developing a model of temporal p…Read more
  •  139
    Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects pe…Read more
  •  138
    “Personal identity” minus the persons
    Philosophical Studies 166 (S1): 91-109. 2013.
    This paper defends a version of strong conventionalism minus the ontological commitments of that view. It defends the claim that strictly speaking there are no persons, whilst explicating how to make sense of talk that is about (or purportedly about) persons, by appealing to features in common to conventionalist accounts of personal identity. This view has the many benefits of conventionalist accounts in being flexible enough to deal with problem cases, whilst also avoiding the various worries a…Read more
  •  132
    What is a Negative Property?
    with Sam Baron, Richard Copley-Coltheart, and Raamy Majeed
    Philosophy 88 (1): 33-54. 2013.
    This paper seeks to differentiate negative properties from positive properties, with the aim of providing the groundwork for further discussion about whether there is anything that corresponds to either of these notions. We differentiate negative and positive properties in terms of their functional role, before drawing out the metaphysical implications of proceeding in this fashion. We show that if the difference between negative and positive properties tabled here is correct, then negative prop…Read more
  •  132
    In “The Open Future” (2021) Patrick Todd argues that the future is open, and that as a consequence all future contingents are false (as opposed to the more common view that they are neither true nor false). Very roughly, this latter claim is motivated by the idea that (a) presentism is true, and so future (and indeed past) things do not exist and (b) if future things do not exist, then the only thing that could ground there being future tensed facts, and hence make those future tensed claims tr…Read more
  •  130
    Vagueness, Persistence and Indeterminate Identity
    Erkenntnis 64 (2): 223-230. 2006.
    I argue that for those who follow Evans in finding indeterminacy of de re identity statements problematic, ontic vagueness within a three-dimensionalist metaphysics will raise some problems that are not faced by the four-dimensionalist. For the types of strategies used to avoid de re indeterminacy within the context of ontic vagueness at-at-time, that is, spatial vagueness, are problematic within a three-dimensionalist framework when put to use within the context of ontic vagueness across-time, …Read more
  •  122
    Talking About a Universalist World
    Philosophical Studies 130 (3): 499-534. 2006.
    The paper defends a combination of perdurantism with mereological universalism by developing semantics of temporary predications of the sort ’some P is/was/will be (a) Q’. We argue that, in addition to the usual application of causal and other restrictions on sortals, the grammatical form of such statements allows for rather different regimentations along three separate dimensions, according to: (a) whether ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are being used as phase or substance sortal terms, (b) whether ‘is’, ‘was’, a…Read more
  •  111
    Mathematical Contingentism
    Erkenntnis 77 (3): 335-359. 2012.
    Platonists and nominalists disagree about whether mathematical objects exist. But they almost uniformly agree about one thing: whatever the status of the existence of mathematical objects, that status is modally necessary. Two notable dissenters from this orthodoxy are Hartry Field, who defends contingent nominalism, and Mark Colyvan, who defends contingent Platonism. The source of their dissent is their view that the indispensability argument provides our justification for believing in the exis…Read more
  •  109
    There is a general form of an argument which I call the ‘argument from vagueness’ which attempts to show that objects persist by perduring, via the claim that vagueness is never ontological in nature and thus that composition is unrestricted. I argue that even if we grant that vagueness is always the result of semantic indeterminacy rather than ontological vagueness, and thus also grant that composition is unrestricted, it does not follow that objects persist by perduring. Unrestricted mereologi…Read more
  •  107
    Ross Cameron’s the moving spotlight reminds me a bit of Pirates of the Caribbean. Although there are no pirates, it’s a rip roaring swashbuckling adventure. It’s a wild ride. Truth be told, many of us will probably conclude that it’s no more plausible an account of our world than is Pirates of the Caribbean a faithful depiction of piracy. I’m not a moving spotlight theorist. There aren’t many of them out there. I’m not even an A-theorist, though there are plenty of those. And there was little ch…Read more
  •  99
    Episodic Imagining, Temporal Experience, and Beliefs about Time
    with Anthony Bigg, Andrew J. Latham, and Shira Yechimovitz
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    We explore the role of episodic imagining in explaining why people both differentially report that it seems to them in experience as though time robustly passes, and why they differentially report that they believe that time does in fact robustly pass. We empirically investigate two hypotheses, the differential vividness hypothesis, and the mental time travel hypothesis. According to each of these, the degree to which people vividly episodically imagine past/future states of affairs influences t…Read more
  •  96
    Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes, and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers h…Read more
  •  94
    The implicit decision theory of non-philosophers
    with Preston Greene, Andrew Latham, and Michael Nielsen
    Synthese 203 (2): 1-23. 2024.
    This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something _as a news item_ and preferring it _as an object of choice_. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people’s im…Read more
  •  83
    Several philosophers have suggested that certain aspects of people’s experience of agency partly explains why people tend to report that it seems to them, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. In turn, it has been suggested that people come to believe that time robustly passes on the basis of its seeming to them in experience that it does. We argue that what require explaining is not just that people report that it seems to them as though time robustly passes, and that they …Read more
  •  78
    Stuff
    American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1). 2009.
    Linguistically, we distinguish between thing terms and stuff terms, where, roughly, "thing" is a count noun, and "stuff" is a mass noun. Syntactically, "thing" functions as a singular referring term, that is, a term that refers to a single "entity" and hence takes "a" and "every" and is subject to pluralization, while "stuff" functions as a plural referring term, that is, it refers to a plurality of "entities" and hence takes "some" and is not subject to pluralization. There exists a thing and s…Read more
  •  74
    There is a good deal of disagreement about composition. There is firstorder disagreement: there are radically different answers to the special composition question—the question of under what circumstances the xs compose a y. There is second-order disagreement: there are different answers to the question of whether first-order disagreement is real or merely semantic. Virtually all disputants with respect to both the first-and second-order issues agree that the answer or answers to the special com…Read more