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27Qualia 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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116Deconstructing new wave materialismIn Carl Gillett & Barry 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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23Nonrigid event-designators and the modal individuation of eventsPhilosophical Studies 37 (4). 1980.
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45Qualia Realism, Its Phenomenal Contents and DiscontentsIn Edmond Wright (ed.), The Case for Qualia, Mit Press. pp. 89--107. 2008.
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69Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty Problem, IIErkenntnis. forthcoming.In “Generalized Conditionalization and the Sleeping Beauty Problem,” Anna Mahtani and I offer a new argument for thirdism that relies on what we call “generalized conditionalization.” Generalized conditionalization goes beyond conventional conditionalization in two respects: first, by sometimes deploying a space of synchronic, essentially temporal, candidate-possibilities that are not “prior” possibilities; and second, by allowing for the use of preliminary probabilities that arise by first brac…Read more
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102‘Could’, possible worlds, and moral responsibilitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 345-358. 1979.
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7What’s the Point?In David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 87-114. 2015.The chapter rehearses the main outlines of gatekeeping contextualism—the view that it is central to the concept of knowledge that attributions of knowledge function in a kind of epistemic gatekeeping for contextually salient communities. The case for gatekeeping contextualism is clarified within an extended discussion of the character of philosophical reflection. The chapter argues that normatively valenced, evaluative concepts constitute a broad class of concepts for which a sociolinguistic poi…Read more
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4Expressivism, yes! Relativism, no!In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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Computation and mental representationIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Mental Representation: A Reader, Blackwell. 1994.
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994New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin EarthJournal of Philosophical Research 16 447-465. 1991.There have been times in the history of ethical theory, especially in this century, when moral realism was down, but it was never out. The appeal of this doctrine for many moral philosophers is apparently so strong that there are always supporters in its corner who seek to resuscitate the view. The attraction is obvious: moral realism purports to provide a precious philosophical good, viz., objectivity and all that this involves, including right answers to (most) moral questions, and the possibi…Read more
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30Relies to our criticsPhilosophical Studies 169 (3): 549-564. 2014.We respond to the central concerns raised by our commentators to our book, The Epistemological Spectrum. Casullo believes that our account of what we term “low-grade a priori” justification provides important clarification of a kind of philosophical reflection. However he objects to calling such reflection a priori. We explain what we think is at stake. Along the way, we comment on his idea of that there may be an epistemic payoff to making a distinction between assumptions and presumptions. In …Read more
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14‘Could’, Possible Worlds, and Moral ResponsibilitySouthern Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 345-358. 1979.
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35Analytic functionalism without representational functionalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1): 51-51. 1993.
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32Levels of Description in Nonclassical Cognitive ScienceRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 34 159-188. 1993.David Marr provided an influential account of levels of description in classical cognitive science. In this paper we contrast Marr'ent with some alternatives that are suggested by the recent emergence of connectionism. Marr's account is interesting and important both because of the levels of description it distinguishes, and because of the way his presentation reflects some of the most basic, foundational, assumptions of classical AI-style cognitive science. Thus, by focusing on levels of descri…Read more
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70From Moral Realism to Moral Relativism in One Easy StepCritica 28 (83): 3-39. 1996.In recent years, defenses of moral realism have embraced what we call new wave moral semantics', which construes the semantic workings of moral terms like good' and right' as akin to the semantic workings of natural-kind terms in science and also takes inspiration from functionalist themes in the philosophy of mind. This sort of semantic view which we find in the metaethical views of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, is the crucial semantical underpinning of a naturalistic brand of moral…Read more
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745New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin EarthJournal of Philosophical Research 16 447-465. 1991.There have been times in the history of ethical theory, especially in this century, when moral realism was down, but it was never out. The appeal of this doctrine for many moral philosophers is apparently so strong that there are always supporters in its corner who seek to resuscitate the view. The attraction is obvious: moral realism purports to provide a precious philosophical good, viz., objectivity and all that this involves, including right answers to (most) moral questions, and the possibi…Read more
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75The Epistemological Spectrum: At the Interface of Cognitive Science and Conceptual AnalysisOxford University Press. 2011.Henderson and Horgan set out a broad new approach to epistemology. They defend the roles of the a priori and conceptual analysis, but with an essential empirical dimension. 'Transglobal reliability' is the key to epistemic justification. The question of which cognitive processes are reliable depends on contingent facts about human capacities.
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62Humean Causation and Kim’s Theory of EventsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 10 (4). 1980.In recent years Jaegwon Kim has propounded and elaborated an influential theory of events. He takes an event to be the exemplification of an empirical property by a concrete object at a time. He also has proposed and endorsed a version of the “Humean” tradition concerning causation: the view that causal relations between concrete events depend upon general "covering laws." But although his explication of the covering-law conception of causation seems quite natural within the framework of his the…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |