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630Neo-positivist metaphysicsPhilosophical Studies 160 (1): 53-78. 2012.Some philosophers argue that many contemporary debates in metaphysics are “illegitimate,” “shallow,” or “trivial,” and that “contemporary analytic metaphysics, a professional activity engaged in by some extremely intelligent and morally serious people, fails to qualify as part of the enlightened pursuit of objective truth, and should be discontinued” (Ladyman and Ross, Every thing must go: Metaphysics naturalized , 2007 ). Many of these critics are explicit about their sympathies with Rudolf Car…Read more
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4Are There Fundamental Intrinsic Properties?In Allan Hazlett (ed.), New Waves in Metaphysics, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 219--39. 2010.
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2834Grounding in the Philosophy of Mind: A DefenseIn Ken Aizawa & Carl Gillett (eds.), Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground, Palgrave-macmillan. 2016.
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117The causal contribution of mental eventsIn Hill Christopher & Gozzano Simone (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical, Cambridge University Press. pp. 230. 2012.
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245Fundamental physical ontologies and the constraint of empirical coherence: a defense of wave function realismSynthese 192 (10): 3105-3124. 2015.This paper defends wave function realism against the charge that the view is empirically incoherent because our evidence for quantum theory involves facts about objects in three-dimensional space or space-time . It also criticizes previous attempts to defend wave function realism against this charge by claiming that the wave function is capable of grounding local beables as elements of a derivative ontology
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100Review of Steven French * The Structure of the World (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2014. 2014.
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252This is a commentary on Mathias Frisch's book Causal Reasoning in Physics (Cambridge 2014). This commentary was presented at the 2016 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in a session sponsored by the Society for the Metaphysics of Science.
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486Physicalism as an attitudePhilosophical Studies 138 (1). 2008.It is widely noted that physicalism, taken as the doctrine that the world contains just what physics says it contains, faces a dilemma which, some like Tim Crane and D.H. Mellor have argued, shows that “physicalism is the wrong answer to an essentially trivial question”. I argue that both problematic horns of this dilemma drop out if one takes physicalism not to be a doctrine of the kind that might be true, false, or trivial, but instead an attitude or oath one takes to formulate one’s ontology …Read more
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142Convergence on the problem of mental causation: Shoemaker's strategy for (nonreductive?) PhysicalistsPhilosophical Issues 20 (1): 438-445. 2010.
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425Microphysical Causation and the Case for PhysicalismAnalytic Philosophy 57 (1): 141-164. 2016.Physicalism is sometimes portrayed by its critics as a dogma, but there is an empirical argument for the position, one based on the accumulation of diverse microphysical causal explanations in physics, chemistry, and physiology. The canonical statement of this argument was presented in 2001 by David Papineau. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate a tension that arises between this way of understanding the empirical case for physicalism and a view that is becoming practically a received positi…Read more
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186Tim Maudlin * The Metaphysics Within Physics (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (3): 683-689. 2011.
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Physical Science |