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Nonreductive materialismIn Richard Warner & Tadeusz Szubka (eds.), The Mind-Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate, Blackwell. 1994.
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112Recognitional concepts and the compositionality of concept possessionPhilosophical Issues 9 27-33. 1998.
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153Robust vagueness and the forced-March sorites paradoxPhilosophical Perspectives 8 159-188. 1994.I distinguish two broad approaches to vagueness that I call "robust" and "wimpy". Wimpy construals explain vagueness as robust (i.e., does not manifest arbitrary precision); that standard approaches to vagueness, like supervaluationism or appeals to degrees of truth, wrongly treat vagueness as wimpy; that vagueness harbors an underlying logical incoherence; that vagueness in the world is therefore impossible; and that the kind of logical incoherence nascent in vague terms and concepts is benign …Read more
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1737The Intentionality of Phenomenology and the Phenomenology of IntentionalityIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Oup Usa. pp. 520--533. 2002.
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131Token physicalism, supervenience, and the generality of physicsSynthese 49 (December): 395-413. 1981.
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15Josep Corbi raises several worries about the metaethical position that Mark Timmons and I have articulated and defended, which we call “nondescriptivist cognitivism.â€â€¦ His remarks prompt some points of clarification…. Timmons and I characterize descriptive content as “way-the-world-might-be†content. We maintain that “base case†beliefs—roughly, those non-evaluative and evaluative beliefs whose contents have the simplest kinds of logical form—are of two types: a non-evaluative b…Read more
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44Science nominalizedPhilosophy of Science 51 (4): 529-549. 1984.I propose a way of formulating scientific laws and magnitude attributions which eliminates ontological commitment to mathematical entities. I argue that science only requires quantitative sentences as thus formulated, and hence that we ought to deny the existence of sets and numbers. I argue that my approach cannot plausibly be extended to the concrete "theoretical" entities of science
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9Nonreductive materialism and the explanatory autonomy of psychologyIn Steven J. Wagner & Richard Warner (eds.), Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, University of Notre Dame Press. 1993.
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144Materialism: Matters of definition, defense, and deconstructionPhilosophical Studies 131 (1): 157-83. 2006.How should the metaphysical hypothesis of materialism be formulated? What strategies look promising for defending this hypothesis? How good are the prospects for its successful defense, especially in light of the infamous “hard problem” of phenomenal consciousness? I will say something about each of these questions.
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115Deconstructing new wave materialismIn Carl Gillett & Barry M. Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. pp. 307--318. 2001.In the first post World War II identity theories (e.g., Place 1956, Smart 1962), mind brain identities were held to be contingent. However, in work beginning in the late 1960's, Saul Kripke (1971, 1980) convinced the philosophical community that true identity statements involving names and natural kind terms are necessarily true and furthermore, that many such necessary identities can only be known a posteriori. Kripke also offered an explanation of the a posteriori nature of ordinary theoretica…Read more
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29Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes From the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2015.How does mind fit into nature? Philosophy has long been concerned with this question. No contemporary philosopher has done more to clarify it than Jaegwon Kim, a distinguished analytic philosopher specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. With new contributions from an outstanding line-up of eminent scholars, this volume focuses on issues raised in Kim's work. The chapters cluster around two themes: first, exclusion, supervenience, and reduction, with attention to the causal exclusion …Read more
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551Troubles on moral twin earth: Moral queerness revivedSynthese 92 (2). 1992.J. L. Mackie argued that if there were objective moral properties or facts, then the supervenience relation linking the nonmoral to the moral would be metaphysically queer. Moral realists reply that objective supervenience relations are ubiquitous according to contemporary versions of metaphysical naturalism and, hence, that there is nothing especially queer about moral supervenience. In this paper we revive Mackie's challenge to moral realism. We argue: (i) that objective supervenience relation…Read more
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215Naturalism and intentionalityPhilosophical Studies 76 (2-3): 301-26. 1994.I argue for three principle claims. First, philosophers who seek to integrate the semantic and the intentional into a naturalistic metaphysical worldview need to address a task that they have thus far largely failed even to notice: explaining into- level connections between the physical and the intentional in a naturalistically acceptable way. Second, there are serious reasons to think that this task cannot be carried out in a way that would vindicate realism about intentionality. Third, there i…Read more
Tucson, Arizona, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |