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40Sohail H. Hashmi and Stephen Lee: Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction (review)Faith and Philosophy 24 (1): 109-112. 2007.
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40Abduction as Practical InferenceThe Commens Encyclopedia: The Digital Encyclopedia of Peirce Studies. 2000.According to C. S. Peirce, abduction is a rational attempt to locate an explanation for a puzzling phenomenon, where this is a process that includes both generating explanatory hypotheses and selecting certain hypotheses for further scrutiny. Since inference is a controlled process that can be subjected to normative standards, essential to his view of abductive rasoning is that it is correlated to a unique species of correctness that cannot be reduced to deductive validity or inductive strength.…Read more
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36In What Way Is Abductive Inference Creative?Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26 (4). 1990.
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35I will discuss the so-called “Master Argument” attributed to Diodorus Cronos in the light of some contemporary speculations on indexicals. In one version, this argument goes as follows: Premise 1. The past, relative to any time t, is necessary. Premise 2. The impossible cannot follow from the possible. Therefore.
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34Doxastic Freedom: A Compatibilist AlternativeAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1): 31-41. 1989.
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31Reliability and Indirect JustificationThe Monist 68 (2): 277-287. 1985.Philosophers commonly speak of a person’s being justified in believing a proposition by one or more reasons he or she has for it. This phenomenon, often called inferential or indirect justification, seems so pervasive that some are tempted to count all epistemic justification as such, though even dessenters from this view can acknowledge that justification through reasons is central to wide domains of cognitive appraisal, e.g., in science and in law. A basic task for the epistemologist is to exp…Read more
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31Quasi-indexical attitudesSorites 11 24-40. 1999.Indexicals are inevitably autobiographical, even when we are not talking about ourselves. For example, if you hear me say, "That portrait right there is beautiful," you can surmise not only that I ascribe beauty to an object of my immediate awareness but also something about my spatial relation to it. Again, if I praise you directly within earshot of others by using the words, "You did that very well!," my concern need not be to cause them to think the exact thought I have; they might not be in …Read more
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30The Phenomenology of FreedomJournal of Mind and Behavior 28 (3/4): 189. 2007.John Searle describes our sense of freedom as an experience of a “gap” between an intentional action and its psychological antecedents, specifically, our reasons.. Since the gap is itself understood as a lack of causation, then no agent can accept the antecedent determination of voluntary action except at the price of “practical inconsistency.” I argue that despite Searle’s insightful discussion, the sense of freedom is not an experience of a gap as he describes it but, instead, is a higher-orde…Read more
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30Indexical Duality: A Fregean TheoryRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 7 (3): 303-320. 2016.: Frege’s remarks about the first-person pronoun in Der Gedanke have elicited numerous commentaries, but his insight has not been fully appreciated or developed. Commentators have overlooked Frege’s reasons for claiming that there are two distinct first-person senses, and failed to realize that his remarks easily generalize to all indexicals. I present a perspectival theory of indexicals inspired by Frege’s claim that all indexical types have a dual meaning which, in turn, leads to a duality of …Read more
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27The Incompatibility of Omniscience and Intentional Action: A Reply to David P. Hunt: Tomis KapitanReligious Studies 30 (1): 55-66. 1994.In ‘Omniprescient Agency’ David P. Hunt challenges an argument against the possibility of an omniscient agent. The argument – my own in ‘Agency and Omniscience’ – assumes that an agent is a being capable of intentional action, where, minimally, an action is intentional only if it is caused, in part, by the agent's intending. The latter, I claimed, is governed by a psychological principle of ‘least effort’, namely, that no one intends without antecedently feeling that deliberate effort is needed …Read more
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25Perfection and modality: Charles Hartshorne's ontological proof (review)International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (2). 1976.
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23Adrian. In the Apology, Socrates said that since death involves one of two alternatives, either nonexistence or transition to a better place, then it is not to be feared. Now I think he was absolutely wrong about this for the simple reason that non-existence is a frightful alternative. For those of us who love life, who want to continue living—and admittedly, that's most people in the world—the prospect of ceasing to exist is a cause of legitimate fear.
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23The terrorism of 'terrorism'In James Sterba (ed.), Terrorism and International Justice, Oxford University Press. pp. 47--66. 2003.
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19My topic today is Europe’s responsibility for the creation and resolution the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the most bitter and explosive political struggles in the world today. In the past 60 years, it has consumed thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and endless hours of debate. It is not localized; it is at the heart of on-going tensions between the West and the Islamic world, and it is directly related to the current American aggression in southern Asia. The fate of international …Read more
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18The Logic of Common Nouns: An Investigation in Quantified Modal LogicNoûs 18 (1): 166-173. 1984.
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12According to Hector-Neri Castañeda, indexical reference is our most basic means of identifying the objects and events we experience and think about. Its tokens reveal our own part in the process by denoting what are "referred to as items present in experience" (Castañeda 1981, 285-6). If you hear me say, "Take that box over there and set it next to this box here," you learn something about my orientation towards the referents in a way that is not conveyed by, "Take the red box and set it next to…Read more
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11The book contains four chapters, each dealing with a central topic to the conflict: self-determination (by Kapitan), the right of return of Palestinian refugees (by Halwani), terrorism (by Kapitan), and the one-state solution (by Halwani)
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11‘Terrorism’ as a Method of TerrorismIn Georg Meggle, Andreas Kemmerling & Mark Textor (eds.), Ethics of Terrorism & Counter-Terrorism, De Gruyter. pp. 21-38. 2004.
DeKalb, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Social and Political Philosophy |