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99Motion blindness and the knowledge argumentIn Peter Ludlow, Yujin Nagasawa & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), There's Something About Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument, Mit Press. pp. 105--142. 2004.In a now famous thought experiment, Frank jackson asked us t0 imagine an omniscient scientist, Mary, who is coniincd in a black-and-white room and then released into the world 0f color . Assuming that she is omniscicnt in respect of all physical facts—roughiy, all the facts available to physics and all the facts that they in turn Hx or determine-physicalism would suggest that there is no new fact Mary can discover after emancipation; physicalism holds that all facts are physical in the relevant …Read more
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135Winch’s double-edged idea of a social scienceHistory of the Human Sciences 13 (1): 63-77. 2000.Peter Winch’s 1958 book The Idea of a Social Science contains two distinguishable sets of theses, one set bearing on the individual-level understanding of human beings, the other on the society-level understanding of the regularities and institutions to which human beings give rise. The first set of claims is persuasive and significant but the second is a mixed bunch: none is well established and only some are sound
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15Theory and Understanding: A Critique of Interpretive Social SciencePhilosophical Review 98 (2): 266. 1989.
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57Liberty and leviathanPolitics, Philosophy and Economics 4 (1): 131-151. 2005.Hobbes made a distinctive contribution to the discussion of freedom on two fronts. He persuaded later, if not immediate, successors that it is only the exercise of a power of interference that reduces peoples freedom, not its (unexercised) existence - not even its existence in an arbitrary, unchecked form. Equally, he persuaded them that the exercise of a power of interference always reduces freedom in the same way, whether it occurs in a republican democracy, purportedly on a non-arbitrary b…Read more
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51Two Sources of MoralitySocial Philosophy and Policy 18 (2): 102. 2001.This essay emerges from consideration of a question in the epistemology of ethics or morality. This is not the common claim-centered question as to how moral claims are confirmed and whether their mode of confirmation gives us grounds to be confident about the prospects for ethical discourse. Instead, I am concerned with the less frequently posed concept-centered question of where in human experience moral terms or concepts are grounded — that is, where in experience the moral becomes salient to…Read more
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9Chapter eight. The commonwealth of ordered wordsIn Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics, Princeton University Press. pp. 115-140. 2009.
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |