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11Ethics and Rules: A Political Reading of Foucault's Aesthetics of ExistencePhilosophy Today 42 (1): 79-84. 1998.
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22Mark Belaguer, Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 30 (2): 80-82. 2010.
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2Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 1. The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008, pp. xix + 583, US$30.00/£17.95 (paper) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 523-525. 2009.
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5Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid and G. Lynn Stephens, eds. Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 28 (1): 67-70. 2008.
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7Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and David Shier, eds., Freedom and Determinism Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 25 (5): 323-326. 2005.
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276Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Moral ResponsibilityOxford University Press UK. 2011.The concept of luck has played an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility, yet participants in these debates have relied upon an intuitive notion of what luck is. Neil Levy develops an account of luck, which is then applied to the free will debate. He argues that the standard luck objection succeeds against common accounts of libertarian free will, but that it is possible to amend libertarian accounts so that they are no more vulnerable to luck than is compatibili…Read more
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67Religious beliefs are factual beliefs: Content does not correlate with context sensitivityCognition 161 (C): 109-116. 2017.
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44Be a Skeptic, Not a MetaskepticIn Gregg Caruso (ed.), Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility, Lexington Books. pp. 87. 2013.
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36Virtues Have Deeply Cultural RootsDao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 14 (2): 195-202. 2015.8 page
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107Open-Mindedness and the Duty to Gather EvidencePublic Affairs Quarterly 20 (1): 55-66. 2006.Most people believe that we have a duty to gather evidence on both sides of central moral and political controversies, in order to fulfil our epistemic responsibilities and come to hold justified cognitive attitudes on these matters. I argue, on the contrary, that to the extent to which these controversies require special expertise, we have no such duty. We are far more likely to worsen than to improve our epistemic situation by becoming better informed on these questions. I suggest we do better…Read more
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223The feeling of doing: Deconstructing the phenomenology of agnecyIn Natalie Sebanz & Wolfgang Prinz (eds.), Disorders of Volition, Mit Press. 2006.Disorders of volition are often accompanied by, and may even be caused by, disruptions in the phenomenology of agency. Yet the phenomenology of agency is at present little explored. In this paper we attempt to describe the experience of normal agency, in order to uncover its representational content
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2The presumption against direct manipulationNeuroethics: Challenges for the 21st Century. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. forthcoming.
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158Embodied savoir-faire: knowledge-how requires motor representationsSynthese 194 (2). 2017.I argue that the intellectualist account of knowledge-how, according to which agents have the knowledge-how to \ in virtue of standing in an appropriate relation to a proposition, is only half right. On the composition view defended here, knowledge-how at least typically requires both propositional knowledge and motor representations. Motor representations are not mere dispositions to behavior because they have representational content, and they play a central role in realizing the intelligence …Read more
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128Libet's impossible demandJournal of Consciousness Studies 12 (12): 67-76. 2005.Abstract : Libet’s famous experiments, showing that apparently we become aware of our intention to act only after we have unconsciously formed it, have widely been taken to show that there is no such thing as free will. If we are not conscious of the formation of our intentions, many people think, we do not exercise the right kind of control over them. I argue that the claim this view presupposes, that only consciously initiated actions could be free, places a condition upon freedom of action wh…Read more
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Stephen Cohen The Nature of Moral Reasoning (review)Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 6 (1). 2004.
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367Downshifting and meaning in lifeRatio 18 (2). 2005.So-called downshifters seek more meaningful lives by decreasing the amount of time they devote to work, leaving more time for the valuable goods of friendship, family and personal development. But though these are indeed meaning-conferring activities, they do not have the right structure to count as superlatively meaningful. Only in work – of a certain kind – can superlative meaning be found. It is by active engagements in projects, which are activities of the right structure, dedicated to the a…Read more
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2335Consciousness and moralityIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2020.It is well known that the nature of consciousness is elusive, and that attempts to understand it generate problems in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. Less appreciated are the important – even if still elusive – connections between consciousness and issues in ethics. In this chapter we consider three such connections. First, we consider the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status. Second, we consider the relevance of consciousne…Read more
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18John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett, eds. , Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 34 (6): 284-286. 2014.
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21Review of Franck grammont, dorothée LeGrand, Pierre Livet (eds.), Naturalizing Intention in Action (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (6). 2010.
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139Culture by naturePhilosophical Explorations 14 (3): 237-248. 2011.One of the major conflicts in the social sciences since the Second World War has concerned whether, and to what extent, human beings have a nature. One view, traditionally associated with the political left, has rejected the notion that we have a contentful nature, and hoped thereby to underwrite the possibility that we can shape social institutions by references only to norms of justice, rather than our innate dispositions. This view has been in rapid retreat over the past three decades, in the…Read more
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190Frankfurt-style cases are widely taken to show that agents do not need alternative possibilities to be morally responsible for their actions. Many philosophers take these cases to constitute a powerful argument for compatibilism: if we do not need alternative possibilities for moral responsibility, it is hard to see what the attraction of indeterminism might be. I defend the claim that even though Frankfurt-style cases establish that agents can be responsible for their actions despite lacking al…Read more
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108Addiction and Self-Control: Perspectives From Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience (edited book)Oup Usa. 2013.This book brings cutting edge neuroscience and psychology into dialogue with philosophical reflection to illuminate the loss of control experienced by addicts, and thereby cast light on ordinary agency and the way in which it sometimes goes wrong
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51Untimely MeditationsSymposium 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 (and therefore out of date) as any twentieth-century can be, while Foucault’s…Read more
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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 |