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80Identity across time: A defense of three-dimensionalismIn Benedikt Schick, Edmund Runggaldier & Ludger Honnefelder (eds.), Unity and Time in Metaphysics, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 1-14. 2009.
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76Ganeri, Jonardon., The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person StanceReview of Metaphysics 67 (1): 160-162. 2013.
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75On being one's own personIn M. Sie, Marc Slors & B. van den Brink (eds.), Reasons of One's Own, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. 2004.
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74RepliesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3). 2002.I am grateful to Dean Zimmerman, Michael Rea, and Derk Pereboom for their close criticism and helpful suggestions for Persons and Bodies. My ideas—especially about the definition of ‘constitution’—have been significantly improved by their comments.
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73Seeming to see redPhilosophical Studies 58 (1-2): 121-128. 1990.In "Understanding the Language of Thought," John Pollock offers a semantics for Mentalese. Along the way, he raises many deep issues concerning, among other things, the indexicality of thought, the relations between thought and communication, the function of 'that'-clauses and the nature of introspection. Regrettably, I must pass over these issues here. Instead, I shall focus on Pollock's views on the nature of appearance and its role in interpreting the language of thought.' I shall examine two…Read more
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71Has content been naturalized?In Barry M. Loewer (ed.), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.The Representational Theory of the Mind (RTM) has been forcefully and subtly developed by Jerry A. Fodor. According to the RTM, psychological states that explain behavior involve tokenings of mental representations. Since the RTM is distinguished from other approaches by its appeal to the meaning or "content" of mental representations, a question immediately arises: by virtue of what does a mental representation express or represent an environmental property like coto or shoe? This question asks…Read more
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68Brief Reply to Rosenkrantz’s Comments on my “The Ontological Status of Persons”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 394-396. 2002.1. Primary-kind properties. Rosenkrantz does not see how a single primary-kind property can be had by x essentially and by y contingently . He offers a reductio ad absurdum of the view that a primary can be had accidentally or derivatively. The reductio has as a premise the following: “[S]omething has a primarykind property, F-ness, derivatively only if the primary-kind property of a nonderivative F, i.e., the property which determines what a nonderivative F most fundamentally is, is nonderivati…Read more
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67On the mind-dependence of temporal becomingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (3): 341-357. 1979.
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67Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the MindCambridge University Press. 1995.Explaining Attitudes offers an important challenge to the dominant conception of belief found in the work of such philosophers as Dretske and Fodor. According to this dominant view beliefs, if they exist at all, are constituted by states of the brain. Lynne Rudder Baker rejects this view and replaces it with a quite different approach - practical realism. Seen from the perspective of practical realism, any argument that interprets beliefs as either brain states or states of immaterial souls is a…Read more
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65Just what do we have in mind?Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1): 25-48. 1985.Nevertheless, I believe that, as it has been construed recently, the assumption is false. At the very least, it does not deserve the largely unquestioned status it enjoys, as I hope to show by a graduated series of thought experiments. I present the thought experiments as a series to expose a shared inadequacy in a variety of individualistic views, from type-type physicalism to the most sophisticated methodological solipsism; and I present them as graduated to suggest that having accepted the fi…Read more
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63Comments on Hubert L. Dreyfus “intelligence without representation”Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 411-412. 2002.
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63Lynne Rudder Baker, Review of Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind by John Haugeland (review)Philosophy of Science 66 (3): 494-495. 1999.
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62Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the MindCambridge University Press. 1995.Explaining Attitudes develops a new account of propositional attitudes - practical realism.
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61Replies (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3): 623-635. 2002.Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.
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55Saving Belief: A Critique of PhysicalismPrinceton University Press. 1987."This book is a comprehensive attack on several of the views that have been most influential in the philosophy of psychology during the last two decades. Professor Baker argues that mentalistic notions should not be eliminated, and need not be explained in terms of other notions, in cognitive science.' The book is interesting and shows an honest concern for clear argumentation. It deserves a wide readership." --Tyler Burge, University of California at Los Angeles"This book is a provocative and r…Read more
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50Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the MindPhilosophical Review 106 (4): 614. 1997.When I started the book, I thought that if there are beliefs, then they are brain states. I still believe that. I express three caveats about the book.
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44Selfless Persons: Goodness in an Impersonal World?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76 143-159. 2015.Mark Johnston takes reality to be wholly objective or impersonal, and aims to show that the inevitability of death does not obliterate goodness in such a naturalistic world. Crucial to his argument is the claim that there are no persisting selves. After critically discussing Johnston's arguments, I set out a view of persons that shares Johnston's view that there are no selves, but disagrees about the prospects of goodness in a wholly impersonal world. On my view, a wholly objective world is onto…Read more
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42L7 The first-person perspective and its relation to natural scienceIn Matthew C. Haug (ed.), Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?, Routledge. 2013.
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41On the twofold nature of artefactsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (1): 132-136. 2006.
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41Reply to Jackson, IIPhilosophical Explorations 3 (2): 196-198. 2000.Commonsense psychological explanations are an integral part of a comprehensive commonsense background that includes almost everything that we deal with everyday— from traffic jams to paychecks to cozy dinners for two. It is the comprehensive commonsense background that I think is not wholesale refutable by science. A good deal of the comprehensive commonsense background itself depends on there being beliefs, desires, intentions and other propositional attitudes. If there never have been proposit…Read more
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39Consciousness Explained (review)Review of Metaphysics 46 (2): 398-399. 1992.Dennett aims to develop an empirical, scientifically respectable theory of human consciousness--one that demystifies the mind by showing how the various phenomena that compose consciousness "are all physical effects of the brain's activities".
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Saint Mary's College of CaliforniaRegular Faculty
Moraga, California, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |