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48Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: The Old Principal Principle Reconciled with the NewPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2): 368-382. 2004.David Lewis (1980) proposed the Principal Principle (PP) and a “reformulation” which later on he called ‘OP’(Old Principle). Reacting to his belief that these principles run into trouble, Lewis (1994) concluded that they should be replaced with the New Principle (NP). This conclusion left Lewis uneasy, because he thought that an inverse form of NP is “quite messy”, whereas an inverse form of OP, namely the simple and intuitive PP, is “the key to our concept of chance”. I argue that, even if OP s…Read more
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981Can I kill my younger self? Time travel and the retrosuicide paradoxPacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (4): 520-534. 2009.If time travel is possible, presumably so is my shooting my younger self ; then apparently I can kill him – I can commit retrosuicide. But if I were to kill him I would not exist to shoot him, so how can I kill him? The standard solution to this paradox understands ability as compossibility with the relevant facts and points to an equivocation about which facts are relevant: my killing YS is compossible with his proximity but not with his survival, so I can kill him if facts like his survival ar…Read more
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69Review of Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (9). 2008.
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635Imperatives, Logic OfIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. pp. 2575-2585. 2013.Suppose that a sign at the entrance of a hotel reads: “Don’t enter these premises unless you are accompanied by a registered guest”. You see someone who is about to enter, and you tell her: “Don’t enter these premises if you are an unaccompanied registered guest”. She asks why, and you reply: “It follows from what the sign says”. It seems that you made a valid inference from an imperative premise to an imperative conclusion. But it also seems that imperatives cannot be true or false, so what doe…Read more
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