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401Darwin's nihilistic idea: Evolution and the meaninglessness of life (review)Biology and Philosophy 18 (5): 653-668. 2003.No one has expressed the destructive power of Darwinian theory more effectively than Daniel Dennett. Others have recognized that the theory of evolution offers us a universal acid, but Dennett, bless his heart, coined the term. Many have appreciated that the mechanism of random variation and natural selection is a substrate-neutral algorithm that operates at every level of organization from the macromolecular to the mental, at every time scale from the geological epoch to the nanosecond. But it …Read more
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23Chapter Five. Where Do We Go from Here?In Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, Princeton University Press. pp. 111-132. 2012.
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329The Illusion of Freedom EvolvesIn Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid & G. Lynn Stephens (eds.), Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, Mit Press. pp. 61. 2007.1. “All Theory is Against Free Will…” Powerful arguments have been leveled against the concepts of free will and moral responsibility since the Greeks and perhaps earlier. Some—the hard determinists—aim to show that free will is incompatible with determinism, and that determinism is true. Therefore there is no free will. Others, the “no-free-will-either-way-theorists,” agree that determinism is incompatible with free will, but add that indeterminism, especially the variety posited by quantum phy…Read more
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142Of zombies, color scientists, and floating iron barsPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.In this paper I challenge the core of David Chalmers' argument against materialism-the claim that "there is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness do not hold." First, I analyze the move from conceivability to logical possibility. Following George Seddon, I consider the case of a floating iron bar and argue that even this seemingly conceivable event has implicit logical contradictions in its description. I then show that the disti…Read more
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17IntroductionIn Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, Princeton University Press. pp. 1-6. 2012.
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22Chapter Two. Moral Responsibility and the Culture of HonorIn Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, Princeton University Press. pp. 33-62. 2012.
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13BibliographyIn Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, Princeton University Press. pp. 213-222. 2012.
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1359More work for hard incompatibilismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3): 511-521. 2009.No Abstract
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284Experimental philosophy and free willPhilosophy Compass 5 (2): 199-212. 2010.This paper develops a sympathetic critique of recent experimental work on free will and moral responsibility. Section 1 offers a brief defense of the relevance of experimental philosophy to the free will debate. Section 2 reviews a series of articles in the experimental literature that probe intuitions about the "compatibility question"—whether we can be free and morally responsible if determinism is true. Section 3 argues that these studies have produced valuable insights on the factors that in…Read more
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30Chapter One. The Appeal to IntuitionIn Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, Princeton University Press. pp. 9-32. 2012.
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