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214Spinoza on Monism (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2011.Spinoza believed that there was only one substance in reality, which he called "God or nature." A number of leading contemporary philosophers have defended monism, this strange and beautiful idea that the cosmos is the source of all being. This book explores both the historical roots of the monism in Spinoza, and its flowering in the 21st century.
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55Ghosts are still scarier than zombies – Reply to Diaz-Leon’s reply to ‘A priori physicalism, lonely ghosts and Cartesian doubt’Consciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 749-750. 2012.
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104A priori physicalism, lonely ghosts and cartesian doubtConsciousness and Cognition 21 (2): 742-746. 2012.A zombie is a physical duplicates of a human being which lacks consciousness. A ghost is a phenomenal duplicate of a human being whose nature is exhausted by consciousness. Discussion of zombie arguments, that is anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of zombies, is familiar in the philosophy of mind literature, whilst ghostly arguments, that is, anti-physicalist arguments which appeal to the conceivability of ghosts, are somewhat neglected. In this paper I argue that ghos…Read more
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598Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help Us Explain ConsciousnessDialectica 63 (3): 289-311. 2009.This paper starts from the assumption that panpsychism is counterintuitive and metaphysically demanding. A number of philosophers, whilst not denying these negative aspects of the view, think that panpsychism has in its favour that it offers a good explanation of consciousness. In opposition to this, the paper argues that panpsychism cannot help us to explain consciousness, at least not the kind of consciousness we have pre-theoretical reason to believe in.
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16Propertied Objects as Truth-MakersIn Paolo Valore (ed.), Topics on General and Formal Ontology, Polimetrica International Scientific Publisher. pp. 181-189. 2006.
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1986Ghosts and Sparse Properties: Why Physicalists Have More to Fear from Ghosts than ZombiesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 81 (1): 119-139. 2010.Zombies are bodies without minds: creatures that are physically identical to actual human beings, but which have no conscious experience. Much of the consciousness literature focuses on considering how threatening philosophical reflection on such creatures is to physicalism. There is not much attention given to the converse possibility, the possibility of minds without bodies, that is, creatures who are conscious but whose nature is exhausted by their being conscious. We can call such a ‘purely …Read more
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267Real acquaintance and physicalismIn Paul Coates & Sam Coleman (eds.), Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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353A posteriori physicalists get our phenomenal concepts wrongAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (2). 2011.Dualists say plausible things about our mental concepts: there is a way of thinking of pain, in terms of how it feels, which is independent of causal role. Physicalists make attractive ontological claims: the world is wholly physical. The attraction of a posteriori physicalism is that it has seemed to do both: to agree with the dualist about our mental concepts, whilst retaining a physicalist ontology. In this paper I argue that, in fact, a posteriori physicalism departs from the dualist's intui…Read more
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100Real materialism and other essays – Galen StrawsonPhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 652-656. 2010.
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3465Against Constitutive Russellian MonismIn Torin Alter Yujin Nagasawa (ed.), Consciousness and the Physical World, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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3948The Phenomenal Bonding Solution} to the Combination ProblemIn G. Bruntrup L. Jaskolla (ed.), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 283--302. 2016.
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4Mario Bunge, Emergence and Convergence. Qualitative Novelty and the Unity of Knowledge Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (6): 389-391. 2004.
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3Can the panpsychist get around the combination problem?(Chapter 6)In David Skrbina (ed.), Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium, John Benjamins. pp. 129--135. 2009.
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7419Cosmopsychism, Micropsychism, and the Grounding RelationIn William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, Routledge. 2019.
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52Review of Cynthia MacDonald, Graham MacDonald (eds.), Emergence in Mind (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
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143Fundamentality and the Mind-Body ProblemErkenntnis 81 (4): 881-898. 2016.In the recent metaphysics literature, a number of philosophers have independently endeavoured to marry sparse ontology to abundant truth. The aim is to keep ontological commitments minimal, whilst allowing true sentences to quantify over a vastly greater range of entities than those which they are ontologically committed to. For example, an ontological commitment only to concrete, microscopic simples might be conjoined with a commitment to truths such as ‘There are twenty people working in this …Read more
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110A non-eliminative understanding of austere nominalismEuropean Journal of Philosophy 16 (1). 2007.How do we account for resemblance between concrete particular objects? What is it about reality which makes a sentence such as the following true? (1) x and y are both spherical Realists about properties claim that, at a fundamental level, this sentence is true because x and y both exemplify the property of sphericity. Michael Loux favours this account of resemblance. Nevertheless, Loux concedes that austere nominalism, which I understand to be the view that nothing exists over and above particu…Read more