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917Counterfactuals and the lawSouth African Journal of Philosophy 12 (3). 1993.This article is concerned with the place counterfactual reasoning occupies in South African law, and how philosophy might be able to help the law. I point out some of the more important and unavoidable uses of counterfactual reasoning in our law. Following this I make some suggestions as to how philosophy, and especially informal logic, can be of help to the law. Finally, I make some suggestions as to how the law in turn can help philosophy.
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249Should we tolerate people who split?Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 1-17. 1992.Thought-experiments in which one person divides into two have been important in the literature on personal identity. I consider three influential arguments which aim to undermine the force of these thought-experiments – arguments from David Wiggins, Patricia Kitcher and Kathleen Wilkes. I argue that all three fail, leaving us to face the consequences of splitting, whatever those may be.
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125Intuitionism, Constructive Interpretation, and CricketPhilosophical Papers 37 (2): 319-331. 2008.This paper is a re-reading of Colin Radford's paper 'The Umpire's Dilemma', published in Analysis in 1985. It argues that Radford's dilemma has been unjustly ignored and has interesting (and problematic) implications for both intuitionism and Ronald Dworkin's constructive interpretationist jurisprudence.
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1123Our Identity, Responsibility and BiologyPhilosophical Papers 3-14. 2004.Eric Olson argues in The Human Animal that thought-experiments involving body-swapping do not in the end offer any support to psychological continuity theories, nor do they pose any threat to his Biological View. I argue that he is mistaken in at least the second claim.
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3182Transplant Thought-Experiments: Two costly mistakes in discounting themSouth African Journal of Philosophy 33 (2): 189-199. 2014.‘Transplant’ thought-experiments, in which the cerebrum is moved from one body to another, have featured in a number of recent discussions in the personal identity literature. Once taken as offering confirmation of some form of psychological continuity theory of identity, arguments from Marya Schechtman and Kathleen Wilkes have contended that this is not the case. Any such apparent support is due to a lack of detail in their description or a reliance on predictions that we are in no position to …Read more
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1438Morals, Metaphysics and the Method of CasesSouth African Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 332-342. 2010.In this paper I discuss a set of problems concerning the method of cases as it is used in applied ethics and in the metaphysical debate about personal identity. These problems stem from research in social psychology concerning our access to the data with which the method operates. I argue that the issues facing ethics are more worrying than those facing metaphysics.
Bellville, South Africa
Areas of Specialization
| Metaphysics |
| Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
| Metaphilosophy |
| Philosophy of Action |
| Metaphysics and Epistemology |