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1343Imagination and BeliefIn Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination, Routledge. pp. 111-123. 2016.This chapter considers the nature of imagination and belief, exploring how deeply these two states of mind differ. It first addresses a range of cognitive and motivational differences between imagination and belief which suggest that they're fundamentally different states of mind. Then it addresses imaginative immersion, delusions, and the different norms we apply to the two mental states, which some theorists regard as providing support for a more unified picture of imagination and belief.
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63Review of James Luchte (ed.), Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.
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2507The Backward Clock, Truth-Tracking, and SafetyJournal of Philosophy 112 (1): 46-55. 2015.We present Backward Clock, an original counterexample to Robert Nozick’s truth-tracking analysis of propositional knowledge, which works differently from other putative counterexamples and avoids objections to which they are vulnerable. We then argue that four ways of analysing knowledge in terms of safety, including Duncan Pritchard’s, cannot withstand Backward Clock either.
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684Nietzschean PragmatismJournal of Nietzsche Studies 48 (1): 56-70. 2017.Nietzsche holds that one should believe what best promotes life, and he also accepts the correspondence theory of truth. I’ll call this conjunction of views Nietzschean pragmatism. This article provides textual evidence for attributing this pragmatist position to Nietzsche and explains how his broader metaethical views led him to it.The following section introduces Nietzschean pragmatism, discussing how Nietzsche expresses it in BGE, and distinguishing it from William James’s pragmatism about tr…Read more
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3058Unequal Vividness and Double EffectUtilitas 25 (3): 291-315. 2013.I argue that the Doctrine of Double Effect is accepted because of unreliable processes of belief-formation, making it unacceptably likely to be mistaken. We accept the doctrine because we more vividly imagine intended consequences of our actions than merely foreseen ones, making our aversions to the intended harms more violent, and making us judge that producing the intended harms is morally worse. This explanation fits psychological evidence from Schnall and others, and recent neuroscientific r…Read more
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IntroductionIn Brian Leiter & Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and morality, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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2949In Defense of PartisanshipIn David Killoren, Emily Crookston & Jonathan Trerise (eds.), Ethics in Politics: The Rights and Obligations of Individual Political Agents, Routledge. pp. 75-90. 2016.This essay explains why partisanship is justified in contemporary America and environments with similar voting systems and coalition structures. It explains how political parties operate, how helping a party succeed can be a goal of genuine ethical significance, and how trusting one party while mistrusting another can be a reliable route to true belief about important political issues.
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82Review of Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (9). 2010.
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5820The Desire‐Belief Account of Intention Explains EverythingNoûs 47 (4): 680-696. 2012.I argue that one intends that ϕ if one has a desire that ϕ and an appropriately related means-end belief. Opponents, including Setiya and Bratman, charge that this view can't explain three things. First, intentional action is accompanied by knowledge of what we are doing. Second, we can choose our reasons for action. Third, forming an intention settles a deliberative question about what to do, disposing us to cease deliberating about it. I show how the desire- belief view can explain why these p…Read more
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2483Advantages of PropositionalismPacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (1): 165-180. 2015.Propositionalism is the view that the contents of intentional attitudes have a propositional structure. Objectualism opposes propositionalism in allowing the contents of these attitudes to be ordinary objects or properties. Philosophers including Talbot Brewer, Paul Thagard, Michelle Montague, and Alex Grzankowski attack propositionalism about such attitudes as desire, liking, and fearing. This article defends propositionalism, mainly on grounds that it better supports psychological explanations
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2068Vengeful thinking and moral epistemologyIn Brian Leiter & Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and morality, Oxford University Press. pp. 262. 2007.
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196Nietzsche and morality (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2007.This volume capitalizes on a growth of interest in Nietzsche's work on morality from two sides -- from scholars of the history of philosophy and from ...
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162159Possible girlsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2). 2008.I argue that if David Lewis’ modal realism is true, modal realists from different possible worlds can fall in love with each other. I offer a method for uniquely picking out possible people who are in love with us and not with our counterparts. Impossible lovers and trans-world love letters are considered. Anticipating objections, I argue that we can stand in the right kinds of relations to merely possible people to be in love with them and that ending a trans-world relationship to start a relat…Read more
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27Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (review)Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (2): 216-218. 2014.
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1862Virtue, Desire, and Silencing ReasonsIn Iskra Fileva (ed.), Questions of Character, Oxford University Press. pp. 158-168. 2016.John McDowell claims that virtuous people recognize moral reasons using a perceptual capacity that doesn't include desire. I show that the phenomena he cites are better explained if desire makes us see considerations favoring its satisfaction as reasons. The salience of moral considerations to the virtuous, like the salience of food to the hungry, exemplifies the emotional and attentional effects of desire. I offer a desire-based account of how we can follow uncodifiable rules of common-sense mo…Read more
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7458Divine Fine-Tuning vs. Electrons in LoveAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 54 (1): 89-98. 2017.I present a novel objection to fine-tuning arguments for God's existence. On any values of the physical constants, the psychophysical laws could be set to permit intelligent and happy beings, so the specific values of the physical constants in our world provide little evidence for God's existence. For example, even if the physical constants didn't allow carbon or any atoms larger than hydrogen, the psychophysical laws could be set so that charge is sufficient to realize romantic desire. Then eve…Read more
APA Eastern Division
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphysics |
Epistemology |
Friedrich Nietzsche |
PhilPapers Editorships
Desire |
Moral Realism and Irrealism |