-
142Internalising practical reasonsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (3). 2004.Practical reasons figure in both the justification and the causal explanation of action. It is usually assumed that the agent’s state of believing rather than what they believe must figure in the causal explanation of action. But, that the agent believes something is not a reason in the sense of being part of the justification of what they do. So it is often concluded that the justifying reason is a different sort of thing from the causally motivating reason. But this means that in a causal proc…Read more
-
334Adopting roles: Generosity and PresumptuousnessRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77 141-161. 2015.Generosity is not the same thing as kindness or self-sacrifice. Presumptuousness is incompatible with generosity, but not with kindness or self-sacrifice. I consider a kind but interfering neighbour who inappropriately takes over the role of mother to my daughter; her behaviour is not generous. Presumptuousness is the improper exercise of a disposition to adopt a role that one does not have. With this in mind I explore the idea that generosity is the proper exercise of the disposition to ado…Read more
-
423The Life of a ProcessIn Guy Debrock (ed.), Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution, Brill | Rodopi. 2003.
-
94Process, Action, and Experience (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Process, Action, and Experience offers a radical new approach to the philosophy of mind and action, taking processes to be the central subject matter. An international team of contributors consider what kinds of things processes are, and explore the progressive nature of action and conscious experience.
-
197ActionRoutledge. 2005.The traditional focus of debate in philosophy of action has been the causal theory of action and metaphysical questions about the nature of actions as events. In this lucid and lively introduction to philosophy of action, Rowland Stout shows how these issues are subsidiary to more central ones that concern the freedom of the will, practical rationality and moral psychology. When seen in these terms, agency becomes one of the most exciting areas in philosophy and one of the most useful ways into …Read more
-
372Was Sally's reason for running from the bear that she thought it was chasing her?In Constantine Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.Arguing against the claim that beliefs are reasons for action.
-
666The Category of Occurrent ContinuantsMind 125 (497): 41-62. 2016.Arguing first that the best way to understand what a continuant is is as something that primarily has its properties at a time rather than atemporally, the paper then defends the idea that there are occurrent continuants. These are things that were, are, or will be happening—like the ongoing process of someone reading or my writing this paper, for instance. A recently popular philosophical view of process is as something that is referred to with mass nouns and not count nouns. This has mistakenl…Read more
-
285Moral philosophyIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2008.Despite being somewhat long in the tooth at the time, Aristotle, Hume and Kant were still dominating twentieth century moral philosophy. Much of the progress made in that century came from a detailed working through of each of their approaches by the expanding and increasingly professionalized corps of academic philosophers. And this progress can be measured not just by the quality and sophistication of moral philosophy at the end of that century, but also by the narrowing of some of the gaps be…Read more
-
31A world of states of affairs by D. M. Armstrong. Cambridge university press, 1997, XIII + 285pp., £14.95 & £40.00. ISBN 0521589487 (pbk); 0521580641 (hbk) (review)Philosophy 74 (1): 122-139. 1999.
-
377Two ways to understand causality in agencyIn Anton Leist (ed.), Action in Context, De Gruyter. 2007.An influential philosophical conception of our mind’s place in the world is as a site for the states and events that causally mediate the world we perceive and the world we affect. According to this conception, states and events in the world cause mental states and events in us through the process of perception. These mental states and events then go on to produce new states and events in the world through the process of action. Our role is as hosts for these states and events that causally medi…Read more
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |