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72Closet dualism and mental causationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 161-181. 1998.Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental cau…Read more
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6Closet Dualism and Mental CausationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (2): 161-181. 1998.Serious doubts about nonreductive materialism — the orthodoxy of the past two decades in philosophy of mind — have been long overdue. Jaegwon Kim has done perhaps the most to articulate the metaphysical problems that the new breed of materialists must confront in reconciling their physicalism with their commitment to the autonomy of the mental. Although the difficulties confronting supervenience, multiple-realizability, and mental causation have been recurring themes in his work, only mental cau…Read more
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113Best opinion, intention-detecting and analytic functionalismPhilosophical Quarterly 44 (175): 239-245. 1994.
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81Moral Realism and Program Explanation: A Very Short Symposium 1: Reply to NelsonAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (2): 337-341. 2009.In chapter 8 of Miller 2003, I argued against the idea that Jackson and Pettit's notion of program explanation might help Sturgeon's non-reductive naturalist version of moral realism respond to the explanatory challenge posed by Harman. In a recent paper in the AJP[Nelson 2006, Mark Nelson has attempted to defend the idea that program explanation might prove useful to Sturgeon in replying to Harman. In this note, I suggest that Nelson's argument fails
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14Philosophy of LanguageRoutledge. 1998.This engaging and accessible introduction to the philosophy of language provides an important guide to one of the liveliest and most challenging areas of study in philosophy. Interweaving the historical development of the subject with a thematic overview of the different approaches to meaning, the book provides students with the tools necessary to understand contemporary analytical philosophy
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74Objective contentAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1). 2003.[Alan Weir] This paper addresses the problem of how to account for objective content-for the distinction between how we actually apply terms and the conditions in which we ought to apply them-from within a naturalistic framework. Though behaviourist or dispositionalist approaches are generally held to be unsuccessful in naturalising objective content or 'normativity', I attempt to restore the credibility of such approaches by sketching a behaviouristic programme for explicating objective content…Read more
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43Philosophy of LanguageMcgill-Queen's University Press. 1998.Starting with Gottlob Frege's foundational theories of sense and reference, Miller provides a useful introduction to the formal logic used in all subsequent philosophy of language. He communicates a sense of active philosophical debate by confronting the views of the early theorists concerned with building systematic theories - such as Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the logical positivists - with the attacks mounted by sceptics - such as W.O. Quine, Saul Kripke, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This leads…Read more
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17Philosophy of LanguageRoutledge. 1998.This engaging and accessible introduction to the philosophy of language provides an important guide to one of the liveliest and most challenging areas of study in philosophy. Interweaving the historical development of the subject with a thematic overview of the different approaches to meaning, the book provides students with the tools necessary to understand contemporary analytical philosophy. The second edition includes new material on: Chomsky, Wittgenstein and Davidson as well as new chapters…Read more
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243Contemporary Metaethics: An IntroductionPolity. 2013.This new edition of Alexander Miller’s highly readable introduction to contemporary metaethics provides a critical overview of the main arguments and themes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contemporary metaethics. Miller traces the development of contemporary debates in metaethics from their beginnings in the work of G. E. Moore up to the most recent arguments between naturalism and non-naturalism, cognitivism and non-cognitivism. From Moore’s attack on ethical naturalism, A. J. Ayer’s em…Read more
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52Davidson’s antirealism?Revista de Filosofia Aurora 27 (40): 265. 2015.Frederic Stoutland (1982a, 1982b) has argued that a Davidsonian theory of meaning is incompatible with a realist view of truth, on which the truth-conditions of sentences consist of mind-independent states of affairs or concatenations of extra-linguistic objects. In this paper we show that Stoutland’s argument is a failure.
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16"Saving the Differences: Essays on Themes from ‘Truth and Objectivity’ ". By Crispin Wright, Harvard UP, 2003, 9780674010772. This volume collects together Crispin Wright’s papers on realism and its oppositions, from his 1987 Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture, in which the programme of his 1992 book Truth and Objectivity was first adumbrated, to papers on aspects of the programme published as recently as 2002. Readers familiar with Truth and Objectivity, and Wright’s earlier collection Realism, Mean…Read more
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12Être chrétien: Les plus beaux sermons by John Henry NewmanNewman Studies Journal 14 (2): 68-70. 2017.
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38Newman’s Theology of the Economic Trinity in His Parochial and Plain SermonsNewman Studies Journal 7 (2): 75-97. 2010.This sermon-study—a sequel to a previous study of Newman’s theology of the Immanent Trinity, 1829–1834 (NSJ 7/1: 73–86)—examines Newman’s theology of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. Viewing the mystery of the Incarnation as the Revelation of Theologia in Oikonomia, Newman developed a “theology of glorification” and a “theology of within-ness,” which in turn grounded a “theology of Rest and Peace.” Newman’s Trinitarian theology (1835–1841), which was deeply influenced by the Fathers of t…Read more
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265The Significance of Semantic RealismSynthese 136 (2): 191-217. 2003.This paper is concerned with the relationship between the metaphysical doctrine of realism about the external world and semantic realism, as characterised by Michael Dummett. I argue that Dummett's conception of the relationship is flawed, and that Crispin Wright's account of the relationship, although designed to avoid the problems which beset Dummett's, nevertheless fails for similar reasons. I then aim to show that despite the fact that Dummett and Wright both fail to give a plausible account…Read more
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72Meaning ScepticismIn Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Quine on Indeterminacy of Translation: The Argument from Below Quine on Indeterminacy of Translation: The Argument from Above Kripke's Wittgenstein's Attack on Meaning Conclusion.
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2Rules-as-rails, tacit knowledge and semantic creativityInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (1): 125-140. 2007.
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Hume : necessary connections and distinct existencesIn Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. 2009.
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34What is the acquisition argument?In Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of language, Oxford University Press. 2003.Semantic realism, as I shall understand it it in this paper, is the combination of the views that sentential understanding is constituted by grasp of truth conditions and that the notion of truth which figures therein is essentially epistemically unconstrained. In a single slogan, understanding a sentence consists in some cases in grasp of potentially recognition-transcendent truth conditions. For example, a semantic realist about the past holds that our understanding of 'Caesar sneezed fifteen …Read more
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157The Argument From Queerness and the Normativity of MeaningIn Martin Grajner & Adolf Rami (eds.), Wahrheit, Bedeutung, Existenz, Ontos. pp. 107-124In his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or “ Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non- factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport to state fa…Read more
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172Semantic Realism and the Argument from Motivational InternalismIn Richard Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 345-362. 2012.In his 1982 book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non-factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport to state …Read more
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129What is the manifestation argument?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (4). 2002.I consider the well known “manifestation challenge” to semantic realism propounded by Michael Dummett, and further developed by Crispin Wright and Bob Hale. I distinguish between strong and weak versions of the challenge, and show that anti–realists effectively concede that realism can meet the strong version. I then argue that the weak version is unmotivated. Building on work by John McDowell and Peter Strawson, and responding to criticisms from Wright, I argue further that the semantic realist…Read more
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145Horwich, Meaning and Kripke’s WittgensteinPhilosophical Quarterly 50 (199): 161-174. 2000.Paul Horwich has argued that Kripke's Wittgenstein's 'sceptical challenge' to the notion of meaning and rule-following only gets going if an 'inflationary' conception of truth is presupposed, and he develops a 'use-theoretic' conception of meaning which he claims is immune to Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical attack. I argue that even if we grant Horwich his 'deflationary' conception of truth, that is not enough to undermine Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical argument. Moreover, Horwich's own 'us…Read more
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1Rule-following, response-dependence, and McDowell's debate with anti-realismIn European Review of Philosophy, Volume 3: Response-Dependence, Stanford: Csli Publications. 1998.
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Catholic University of AmericaGraduate student
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |