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45William Hirstein , Mindmelding: Consciousness, Neuroscience, and the Mind's Privacy . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 34 (1-2): 75-77. 2014.
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71Peter Ulric Tse , The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 33 (4): 331-333. 2013.
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A Gresham's Law For Reporting About GeneticsAustralian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 4 (2). 2002.
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5Untimely Meditations: Periodising Recent French ThoughtSymposium 2 (1): 61-75. 1998.Most accounts of recent French intellectual history are organized around a fundamental rupture, which divides thought and thinkers into two eras: ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’. But the attempts to identify the features which characterise these eras seem, at best, inconclusive. In this paper, I examine this rupture, by way of a comparison of two thinkers representative of the divide. Sartre seems as uncontroversially modern as any twentieth-century can be, while Foucault’s work is often taken to be d…Read more
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129History as struggle: Foucault's genealogy of genealogyHistory of the Human Sciences 11 (4): 159-170. 1998.
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156Neuroethics: Challenges for the 21st CenturyCambridge University Press. 2007.Neuroscience has dramatically increased understanding of how mental states and processes are realized by the brain, thus opening doors for treating the multitude of ways in which minds become dysfunctional. This book explores questions such as when is it permissible to alter a person's memories, influence personality traits or read minds? What can neuroscience tell us about free will, self-control, self-deception and the foundations of morality? The view of neuroethics offered here argues that m…Read more
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236Libertarianism in all its varieties is widely taken to be vulnerable to a serious problem of present luck, inasmuch as it requires indeterminism somewhere in the causal chain leading to action. Genuine indeterminism entails luck, and lack of control over the ensuing action. Compatibilism, by contrast, is generally taken to be free of the problem of present luck, inasmuch as it does not require indeterminism in the causal chain. I argue that this view is false: compatibilism is subject to a probl…Read more
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90Ecological Engineering: Reshaping Our Environments to Achieve Our GoalsPhilosophy and Technology 25 (4): 589-604. 2012.Human beings are subject to a range of cognitive and affective limitations which interfere with our ability to pursue our individual and social goals. I argue that shaping our environment to avoid triggering these limitations or to constrain the harms they cause is likely to be more effective than genetic or pharmaceutical modifications of our capacities because our limitations are often the flip side of beneficial dispositions and because available enhancements seem to impose significant costs.…Read more
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Michel FoucaultFoucault Studies 20-31. 2004.ABSTRACT: In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo‐American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule‐based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest t…Read more
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152The apology paradox and the non-identity problemPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (208): 358-368. 2002.Janna Thompson has outlined ‘the apology paradox’, which arises whenever people apologize for an action or event upon which their existence is causally dependent. She argues that a sincere apology seems to entail a wish that the action or event had not occurred, but that we cannot sincerely wish that events upon which our existence depends had not occurred. I argue that Thompson’s paradox is a backward-looking version of Parfit’s (forward-looking) ‘non-identity problem’, where backward- and forwa…Read more
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117Dissolving the Puzzle of Resultant Moral LuckReview of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1): 127-139. 2016.The puzzle of resultant moral luck arises when we are disposed to think that an agent who caused a harm deserves to be blamed more than an otherwise identical agent who did not. One popular perspective on resultant moral luck explains our dispositions to produce different judgments with regard to the agents who feature in these cases as a product not of what they genuinely deserve but of our epistemic situation. On this account, there is no genuine resultant moral luck; there is only luck in wha…Read more
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47Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins (eds.) , Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 34 (3-4): 132-135. 2014.
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6SartreONEWorld Publications. 2002.This introduction traces the philosophical achievements of a thinker sonfluential that his death in 1980 brought 50,000 people on to the streets ofaris. The account of Jean-Paul Sartre - writer, journalist and intellectualornerstone of the 20th century - stretches from his early existential phaseo his later Marxist beliefs. With coverage of such major contemporary issuess human liberty, sociobiology, the ethics of work, and the influence ofenetics on ideas of individual freedom, Neil Levy uses a…Read more
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59Conspiracy Theories (review)Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines 24 (1-2): 47-48. 2004.
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82Deafness, culture, and choiceJournal of Medical Ethics 28 (5): 284-285. 2002.We should react to deaf parents who choose to have a deaf child with compassion not condemnationThere has been a great deal of discussion during the past few years of the potential biotechnology offers to us to choose to have only perfect babies, and of the implications that might have, for instance for the disabled. What few people foresaw is that these same technologies could be deliberately used to ensure that children would be born with disabilities. That this is a real possibility, and not …Read more
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8Robert Kane, Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 26 (3): 200-202. 2006.
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185Consciousness and Moral ResponsibilityOxford University Press. 2014.Neil Levy presents a new theory of freedom and responsibility. He defends a particular account of consciousness--the global workspace view--and argues that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. There are good reasons to think that the naïve assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true
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21What Difference Does Consciousness Make?Monash Bioethics Review 28 (2): 13-25. 2009.The question whether and when it is morally appropriate to withdraw life-support from patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state is one of the most controversial in bioethics. Recent work on the neuroscience of consciousness seems to promise fundamentally to alter the debate, by demonstrating that some entirely unresponsive patients are in fact conscious. In this paper, I argue that though this work is extremely important scientifically, it ought to alter the debate over the …Read more
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42Psychopathy, responsibility and the moral/conventional distinctionIn Luca Malatesti & John McMillan (eds.), Responsibility and Psychopathy: Interfacing Law, Psychiatry and Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 213--226. 2010.
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461The case for physician assisted suicide: how can it possibly be proven?Journal of Medical Ethics 32 (6): 335-338. 2006.In her paper, The case for physician assisted suicide: not proven, Bonnie Steinbock argues that the experience with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act fails to demonstrate that the benefits of legalising physician assisted suicide outweigh its risks. Given that her verdict is based on a small number of highly controversial cases that will most likely occur under any regime of legally implemented safeguards, she renders it virtually impossible to prove the case for physician assisted suicide. In thi…Read more
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182The Value of ConsciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 21 (1-2): 127-138. 2014.Consciousness, or its lack, is often invoked in debates in applied and normative ethics. Conscious beings are typically held to be significantly more morally valuable than non-consious, so that establishing whether a being is conscious becomes of critical importance. In this paper, I argue that the supposition that phenomenal consciousness explains the value of our experiences or our lives, and the moral value of beings who are conscious, is less well-grounded than is commonly thought. A great d…Read more
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163Foucault as Virtue EthicistFoucault Studies 1 20-31. 2004.In his last two books and in the essays and interviews associated with them, Foucault develops a new mode of ethical thought he describes as an aesthetics of existence. I argue that this new ethics bears a striking resemblance to the virtue ethics that has become prominent in Anglo-American moral philosophy over the past three decades, in its classical sources, in its opposition to rule-based systems and its positive emphasis upon what Foucault called the care for the self. I suggest that seeing…Read more
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11Nomy Arpaly, Merit, Meaning and Human Bondage: An Essay on Free Will Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 27 (2): 89-91. 2007.
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238Epistemic Akrasia and the Subsumption of Evidence: A ReconsiderationCroatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (1): 149-156. 2004.According to one influential view, advanced by Jonathan Adler, David Owens and Susan Hurley, epistemic akrasia is impossible because when we form a full belief, any apparent evidence against that belief loses its power over us. Thus theoretical reasoning is quite unlike practical reasoning, in that in the latter our desires continue to exert a pull, even when they are outweighed by countervailing considerations. I call this argument against the possibility of epistemic akrasia the subsumption vi…Read more
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Laurence Tancredi, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals About MoralityPhilosophy in Review 27 (1): 76. 2007.
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26Review of moral psychology, volume 1, the evolution of morality (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3). 2009.No abstract
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University of OxfordRegular Faculty (Part-time)
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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Social Epistemology |
Philosophy of Psychology |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Action |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |