King's College London
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1996
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  195
    John Foster the divine lawmaker
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (2): 453-457. 2009.
  •  17
    Hume’s impact on causation
    The Philosophers' Magazine 54 75-79. 2011.
    Many philosophers came to regard “causation” as an illegitimate pseudo-concept. This was a dominant view in analytic philosophy until quite late in the twentieth century. Russell famously quipped that “the law of causality” was “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm”.
  •  547
    Probability as a guide to life
    In David Papineau (ed.), The Roots of Reason, Oxford University Press. pp. 217-243. 2003.
  •  164
    Chance-changing causal processes
    In Phil Dowe & Paul Noordhof (eds.), Cause and Chance, Routledge. pp. 39-57. 2003.
    Scepticism concerning the idea of causation being linked to contingent chance-raising is articulated in Beebee’s challenging chapter. She suggests that none of these approaches will avoid the consequence that spraying defoliant on a weed is a cause of the weed’s subsequent health. We will always be able to abstract away enough of the healthy plant processes so all that’s left is the causal chain involving defoliation and health. In those circumstances, there will be contingent chance-raising. Be…Read more
  •  434
    Seeing causing
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (3): 257-280. 2003.
    Singularists about causation often claim that we can have experiences as of causation. This paper argues that regularity theorists need not deny that claim; hence the possibility of causal experience is no objection to regularity theories of causation. The fact that, according to a regularity theorist, causal experience requires background theory does not provide grounds for denying that it is genuine experience. The regularity theorist need not even deny that non-inferential perceptual knowledg…Read more
  •  40
    Hume Studies Referees, 2007–2008
    with Donald Ainslie, Carla Bagnoli, Donald Baxter, Tom Beauchamp, Martin Bell, Deborah Boyle, John Bricke, Deborah Brown, and Dorothy Coleman
    Hume Studies 34 (2): 323-324. 2008.
  •  606
  •  687
    Necessary Connections and the Problem of Induction
    Noûs 45 (3): 504-527. 2011.
    In this paper Beebee argues that the problem of induction, which she describes as a genuine sceptical problem, is the same for Humeans than for Necessitarians. Neither scientific essentialists nor Armstrong can solve the problem of induction by appealing to IBE, for both arguments take an illicit inductive step.
  •  1053
    Hume’s Two Definitions: The Procedural Interpretation
    Hume Studies 37 (2): 243-274. 2011.
    Hume's two definitions of causation have caused an extraordinary amount of controversy. The starting point for the controversy is the fact, well known to most philosophy undergraduates, that the two definitions aren't even extensionally equivalent, let alone semantically equivalent. So how can they both be definitions? One response to this problem has been to argue that Hume intends only the first as a genuine definition—an interpretation that delivers a straightforward regularity interpretation…Read more
  •  507
  •  29
    Essentialism--roughly, the view that natural kinds have discrete essences, generating truths that are necessary but knowable only _a posteriori_--is an increasingly popular view in the metaphysics of science. At the same time, philosophers of language have been subjecting Kripke’s views about the existence and scope of the necessary _a posteriori_ to rigorous analysis and criticism. Essentialists typically appeal to Kripkean semantics to motivate their radical extension of the realm of the neces…Read more
  •  1208
    Causing and Nothingness
    In L. A. Paul, E. J. Hall & J. Collins (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals, Mit Press. pp. 291--308. 2004.
  •  47
    Review of Skyrms & Eells (eds.), Probabilities & Conditionals (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (1): 181-184. 1998.
  •  694