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99Conscious Propositional Attitudes and Moral ResponsibilityJournal of Moral Philosophy 11 (5): 585-597. 2014.By drawing on empirical evidence, Matt King and Peter Carruthers have recently argued that there are no conscious propositional attitudes, such as decisions, and that this undermines moral responsibility. Neil Levy responds to King and Carruthers, and claims that their considerations needn’t worry theorists of moral responsibility. I argue that Levy’s response to King and Carruthers’ challenge to moral responsibility is unsatisfactory. After that, I propose what I take to be a preferable way of …Read more
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742Evolution, Moral Justification, and Moral RealismRivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior 3 (1): 8-18. 2012.Does evolutionary theory have the potential to undermine morality? In his book The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce (2006) argues for a positive answer. He contends that an evolutionary account of morality would undermine moral judgements and lend support to moral scepticism. I offer a critique of Joyce’s argument. As it turns out, his case can be read in two different ways. It could be construed as an argument to establish a general scepticism about the justification of moral judgements. Or…Read more
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196Human thinking, shared intentionality, and egocentric biasesBiology and Philosophy 30 (6): 1-16. 2015.The paper briefly summarises and critiques Tomasello’s A Natural History of Human Thinking. After offering an overview of the book, the paper focusses on one particular part of Tomasello’s proposal on the evolution of uniquely human thinking and raises two points of criticism against it. One of them concerns his notion of thinking. The other pertains to empirical findings on egocentric biases in communication
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468Interpretive sensory-access theory and conscious intentionsPhilosophical Psychology 27 (4). 2014.It is typically assumed that while we know other people’s mental states by observing and interpreting their behavior, we know our own mental states by introspection, i.e., without interpreting ourselves. In his latest book, The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-knowledge, Peter Carruthers (2011) argues against this assumption. He holds that findings from across the cognitive sciences strongly suggest that self-knowledge of conscious propositional attitudes such as intentions, judgme…Read more
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373Self-Knowledge and Consciousness of AttitudesJournal of Consciousness Studies 21 (1-2): 139-155. 2014.Suppose we know our own attitudes, e.g. judgments and decisions, only by unconsciously interpreting ourselves. Would this undermine the assumption that there are conscious attitudes? Carruthers has argued that if the mentioned view of selfknowledge is combined with either of the two most common approaches to consciousness, i.e. the higher-order state account or the global workspace theory , then the conjunction of these theories implies that there are no conscious attitudes. I shall show that Ca…Read more
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1426Teleosemantics, Swampman, and Strong RepresentationalismGrazer Philosophische Studien 90 (1). 2014.Teleosemantics explains mental representation in terms of biological function and selection history. One of the main objections to the account is the so-called ‘Swampman argument’ (Davidson 1987), which holds that there could be a creature with mental representation even though it lacks a selection history. A number of teleosemanticists reject the argument by emphasising that it depends on assuming a creature that is fi ctitious and hence irrelevant for teleosemantics because the theory is only …Read more
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Utrecht UniversityAssistant Professor
Utrecht, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |