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64ActionRoutledge. 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
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267Was 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.
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747The 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
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252Moral 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
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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.
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394Two 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
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74Descartes's hidden argument for the existence of GodBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 6 (2). 1998.
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37The book is an extended argument against neuralism (or against a sort of argument for neuralism), where neuralism is understood to be the identification of mental events with neurophysiological events. So an event of a trying is not supposed to be inner in the sense that a brain event is. And although Pietroski accepts Descartes metaphysical distinction between mental events and physical events, he does not need to extend this to the thought that mental events occupy a special mental realm. So t…Read more
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What you know when you know how someone behavesElectronic Journal of Anlaytic Philosophy 7. 2002.[1] In chapter 2 of _The Concept of Mind_, “Knowing How and Knowing That”, and especially in the section on “Understanding and Misunderstanding”, Ryle rejects two approaches to the question of the interpretation of other minds that correspond quite closely with what are now called functionalism, or theory theory, and simulation theory. There is a painful irony here that the functionalist approach to the philosophy of mind, which developed in the late 60s and 70s, has widely been regarded as comp…Read more
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31The evolution of theoretically useful traitsBiology and Philosophy 13 (4): 529-540. 1998.The purely theoretical notion of fitness or optimality that is employed for instance in optimization theory has come under attack from those who think that only a more historically based notion of fitness could have a central role in evolutionary explanation. They argue that the key notion is proven usefulness rather than theoretical usefulness. This paper articulates a notion of theoretical usefulness and defends its role in functional evolutionary explanations.
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305in O’Rourke, F. (ed.), Human Destinies (Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
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271BehaviourismThink 2 (5): 37-44. 2003.The central claim of philosophical behaviourism is this: what it is to be in a certain state of mind is to be disposed to behave in a certain way. Most philosophers think that this claim is obviously false. They also think it is offensive. They think it is offensive because it appears to reduce or eliminate what is most valuable to us – our minds. It puts the notion of behaviour in the place of mind, and so removes what distinguishes us from automata. B. F. Skinner, one of the most famous (notor…Read more
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |