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309Virtue epistemology and moral luckJournal of Moral Philosophy 3 (2): 179--192. 2006.Thomas Nagel has proposed that the existence of moral luck mandates a general attitude of skepticism in ethics. One popular way of arguing against Nagel’s claim is to insist that the phenomenon of moral luck itself is an illusion , in the sense that situations in which it seems to occur may be plausibly re-described so as to show that agents need not be held responsible for the unlucky outcomes of their actions. Here I argue that this strategy for explaining away moral luck fails because it does…Read more
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147Psychological Trauma and the Simulated SelfPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (3): 349-364. 2014.In the 1980s, there was a significant upsurge in diagnoses of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Ian Hacking suggests that the roots of this tendency lie in the excessive willingness of psychologists past and present to engage in the “psychologization of trauma.” I argue that Hacking makes some philosophically problematic assumptions about the putative threat to human autonomy that is posed by the increasing availability, attractiveness, and plausibility of various forms of simulated experience. I …Read more
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A Prolegomenon to Radical InterpretationDissertation, The Ohio State University. 2002.About halfway through the twentieth century, it became a fairly common practice amongst philosophers and psychologists to speculate about the procedures whereby human beings might come to understand one another's speech in what have come to be known as the circumstances of "radical interpretation." Writers belonging to this tradition shared a common curiosity about how understanding of a human language might be achieved by an investigator to whom that language was more or less totally unfamiliar…Read more
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20"Thick" Aesthetic Emotions and the Autonomy of ArtPhilosophy and Literature 40 (2): 415-430. 2016.For the properly “cultivated,” proclaimed Oscar Wilde in 1890, “beautiful things mean only Beauty.”1 The idea that artworks possess a discrete and autonomous type of value, by virtue of their capacity to provoke a distinctively aesthetic type of response, is most often associated with artists and critics belonging to the modernist tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Certainly, many influential writers of the period who expressed more instrumentalist attitudes toward t…Read more
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133Computing machinery and emergence: The aesthetics and metaphysics of video gamesMinds and Machines 15 (1): 73-89. 2004.We build on some of Daniel Dennett’s ideas about predictive indispensability to characterize properties of video games discernable by people as computationally emergent if, and only if: (1) they can be instantiated by a computing machine, and (2) there is no algorithm for detecting instantiations of them. We then use this conception of emergence to provide support to the aesthetic ideas of Stanley Fish and to illuminate some aspects of the Chomskyan program in cognitive science
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20th Century Philosophy |
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Literature |
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Philosophy of Language |
Aesthetics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
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Philosophy of Literature |