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82From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2016.Character plays a central role in our everyday understanding and evaluation of ourselves and one another. It informs the expectations that ground our plans and projects, our moral responses to other people's behaviour and to opportunities we ourselves face, and our political decisions concerning formal education, criminal punishment, and other aspects of social organisation. These philosophical essays clarify this idea of character, analyse its relation with the findings of experimental psycholo…Read more
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80A law unto oneselfPhilosophical Quarterly 62 (246): 170-189. 2012.We should understand the concept of self-legislation that is central to Kant's moral philosophy not in terms of the enactment of statute, but in terms of the way in which judges make law, by setting down and refining precedent through particular judgements. This paper presents a descriptive model of agency based on self-legislation so understood, and argues that we can read Kant's normative ethics as based on this view of agency. It is intended to contribute to contemporary debates in moral psyc…Read more
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62Sartre’s transcendental phenomenologyIn Dan Zahavi (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, Oxford University Press. 2018.The first phase of Sartre’s philosophical publications is marked by an apparent ambivalence towards Husserl’s transcendental turn. Sartre accepts both major aspects of that turn, the phenomenological reduction and the use of transcendental argumentation. Yet his rejection of the transcendental ego that Husserl derives from this transcendental turn overlooks an obvious transcendental argument in favour of it. His books on emotion and imagination, moreover, make only very brief comments about the …Read more
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54ExistentialismIn John Skorupski (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Ethics, Routledge. 2010.Since it gained currency at the end of the second world war, the term “existentialism” has mostly been associated with a cultural movement that grew out of the wartime intellectual atmosphere of the Left Bank in Paris and spread through fiction and art as much as philosophy. The theoretical and other writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon in the 1940s and 1950s are usually taken as central to this movement, as are the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, th…Read more
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49Virtue and Vice in the Hurt LockerDialogue (37). 2011.Much of the critical praise for the film concerns the first of these aims. Bigelow’s use of at least four film crews for every scene affords the sense of being present in the situation, continuously shifting perspective, alert to possible danger. The relative anonymity of the scenery, clearly somewhere in the Middle East but not clearly anywhere in particular, fosters this uneasy sense of immersion in an unfamiliar scenario where the sources of danger are unpredictable. Protracted periods of sil…Read more
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31Transcendental Phenomenology Meets Negritude PoetryIn Kris Sealey & Storm Heter (eds.), Creolizing Sartre, Rowman & Littlefield. 2024.In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. These chan…Read more
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30Cultivating VirtueRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 72 239-259. 2013.Ought you to cultivate your own virtue? Various philosophers have argued that there is something suspect about directing one's ethical attention towards oneself in this way. These arguments can be divided between those that deem aiming at virtue for its own sake to be narcissistic and those that consider aiming at virtue for the sake of good behaviour to involve a kind of doublethink. Underlying them all is the assumption that epistemic access to one's own character requires an external point of…Read more
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24Sociality, Seriousness, and CynicismSartre Studies International 26 (1): 61-76. 2020.This article is a clarification and development of my interpretation of Sartre’s theory of bad faith in response to Ronald Santoni’s sophisticated critique, published in this issue. It begins by clarifying Sartre’s conception of a project and explaining his claim that one project is fundamental, thereby elucidating the idea that bad faith is a fundamental project. This forms the groundwork of my responses to Santoni’s critique of my interpretation, which comprises four arguments: Sartre does not…Read more
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20Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues (review)Philosophical Quarterly 70 (279): 438-440. 2020.Existential Flourishing: A Phenomenology of the Virtues. By McMullin Irene.
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20Rethinking Existentialism: From radical freedom to project sedimentationIn Joe Saunders (ed.), Freedom After Kant: From German Idealism to Ethics and the Self, Blackwell's. pp. 191-204. 2023.In the mid-1940s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre both argued that a person’s preferences and behaviour are ultimately explained by their projects, which they have chosen and can reject. However, they did not agree on the details. Sartre’s theory of ‘radical freedom’ was that projects have no inertia of their own and persist only if they continue to be endorsed. Beauvoir held that projects become gradually sedimented with continued endorsement, increasing in both influence and inertia ov…Read more
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19Sartre's Critique of PatriarchyFrench Studies 78 (1): 72-88. 2024.Jean-Paul Sartre developed a sophisticated and insightful feminist critique of western society through two plays and two screenplays written between 1944 and 1946 –– Huis clos, Les Jeux sont faits, Typhus, and La Putain respectueuse. In these works, Sartre explores the relations between economic oppression, epistemic injustice, and misogynistic violence, diagnoses their root cause as the patriarchal norms of femininity and masculinity, and ascribes the power of those norms to bad faith and inter…Read more
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18Integrity as the Goal of Character EducationRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 92 185-207. 2022.Schools and universities should equip students with the ability to deal with an unpredictable environment in ways that promote worthwhile and fulfilling lives. The world is rapidly changing and the contours of our ethical values have been shaped by the world we have lived in. Education therefore needs to cultivate in students the propensity to develop and refine ethical values that preserve important insights accrued through experience while responding to novel challenges. Therefore, we should a…Read more
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16Values and Virtues for a Challenging World (edited book)Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
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14Reconstructing AlfieThe Philosophers' Magazine 47 61-66. 2009.Now, it don't do to remake a perfectly good film and do a bad job of it. That can rob us of something important. It ain't the sequence of events that makes a good story, see, it's the ideas driving it. And if you ain't got that, what have you got? Know what I mean?
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12Automaticity in virtuous actionIn Nancy Snow & Franco Trivigno (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness, Routledge. pp. 75-90. 2014.
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12Motivated Aversion: Non-Thetic Awareness in Bad FaithSartre Studies International 8 45-57. 2002.
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12Joseph S. Catalano, Reading Sartre, Cambridge University Press, 2010, 213pp., $25.99 , ISBN 9780521152273. [Book Review]Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201102. 2011.Review of Joseph Catalano's book Reading Sartre.
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10Review of Joseph S. Catalano, Reading Sartre (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
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10Automaticity in virtuous actionIn Nancy Snow & Franco Trivigno (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Character and Happiness, Routledge. pp. 75-90. 2014.
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6Catalano, Joseph S. Reading Sartre - 213pp, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, Paperback,£25.99, ISBN 9780521152273 [Book Review]Notre Dame Philosophical Review 2011. 2011.
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1Book Reviews (review)Sartre Studies International 29 (1): 90-107. 2023.Oliver Gloag, Albert Camus: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 112pp. ISBN: 9780198792970. £8.99 (paperback). Meryl Altman, Beauvoir in Time (Leiden: Brill, 2020), x + 570pp. ISBN: 9789004431201. €142.00 (hardback); ISBN: 9789004431218 (open-access e-book). Alfred Betschart and Juliane Werner (eds), Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism (London: Palgrave, 2020), 388pp. ISBN: 978-3-030-38481-4. $129.99 (hardback); ISBN: 9783030384845. $129.99 (paper…Read more
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Instilling virtueIn Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.
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Cultivating virtueIn Havi Carel & Darian Meacham (eds.), Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, Cambridge University Press. 2013.