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84"You don't see with your eyes, you perceive with your mind": Knowledge and PerceptionIn D. Darby & T. Shelby (eds.), Hip Hop and Philosophy, Open Court. 2005.A major theme in rap lyrics is that the only way to survive is to use your head, be aware, know what’s going on around you. That simple idea packs a lot of background. The most obvious ideas about knowledge turn out if you look at them close up to be pretty questionable. For example: How do we get knowledge about the world? A natural and ancient answer to this question is that much if not all of our knowledge comes from our senses. So for example the nose gives us knowledge of what things smell …Read more
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92Moore's many paradoxesPhilosophical Papers 28 (2): 97-109. 1999.Over the last two decades J.N. Williams has developed an account of the absurdity of such utterances as Its raining but I dont believe it that is both intuitively plausible and applicable to a wide variety of forms that this so-called Moorean absurdity can take. His approach is also noteworthy for making only minimal appeal to principles of epistemic or doxastic logic in its account of such absurdity. We first show that Williams places undue emphasis upon assertion and belief: It is similarly ab…Read more
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50II—Mitchell Green: Perceiving EmotionsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1): 45-61. 2010.
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36Engaging Philosophy: A Brief IntroductionHackett. 2006.This brief book introduces students and general readers to philosophy through core questions and topics -- particularly those involving ethics, the existence of God, free will, the relation of mind and body, and what it is to be a person. It also features a chapter on reasoning, both theoretical and practical, that develops an account of both cogent logical reasoning and rational decision-making. Throughout, the emphasis is on initiating newcomers to philosophy through rigorous yet lively consid…Read more
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287Speech actsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do…Read more
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92Attitude ascription's affinity to measurementInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (3): 323-348. 1999.The relation between two systems of attitude ascription that capture all the empirically significant aspects of an agents thought and speech may be analogous to that between two systems of magnitude ascription that are equivalent relative to a transformation of scale. If so, just as an objects weighing eight pounds doesnt relate that object to the number eight (for a different but equally good scale would use a different number), similarly an agents believing that P need not relate her to P (for…Read more
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227Perceiving EmotionsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1): 45-61. 2010.I argue that it is possible literally to perceive the emotions of others. This account depends upon the possibility of perceiving a whole by perceiving one or more of its parts, and upon the view that emotions are complexes. After developing this account, I expound and reply to Rowland Stout's challenge to it. Stout is nevertheless sympathetic with the perceivability-of-emotions view. I thus scrutinize Stout's suggestion for a better defence of that view than I have provided, and offer a refinem…Read more
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138How to Express Yourself: Refinements and Elaborations on the Central Ideas of Self-ExpressionProtosociology Forum. 2011.This articles gives an overview of the main themes and arguments of _Self-Expression_ (OUP,2007; paper, 2011), and responds to some recent publications in which that book is discussed. In the process of these responses, the article provides refinements and elaborations on some of the book's central claims.
Storrs Mansfield, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Biology |