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265Closing the gap? Some questions for neurophenomenologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (4): 349-64. 2004.In his 1996 paper Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem, Francisco Varela called for a union of Husserlian phenomenology and cognitive science. Varela''s call hasn''t gone unanswered, and recent years have seen the development of a small but growing literature intent on exploring the interface between phenomenology and cognitive science. But despite these developments, there is still some obscurity about what exactly neurophenomenology is. What are neurophenomenologist…Read more
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41Phenomenal holism, internalism and the neural correlates of consciousness: CommentJournal of Consciousness Studies 11 (1): 32-37. 2004.The target paper by Noë and Thompson is a very welcome addition to the literature on the neural correlates of consciousness. It raises a number of important issues, and the debate it will generate should go some way towards clarifying the conceptual terrain that we’re in. In this commentary I focus on three issues: the link between isomorphism and the matching-content doctrine; the argument against the matching-content doctrine; and the argument against experiential internalism.
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194Moral status and the treatment of dissociative identity disorderJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 27 (1): 87-105. 2002.Many contemporary bioethicists claim that the possession of certain psychological properties is sufficient for having full moral status. I will call this thepsychological approach to full moral status. In this paper, I argue that there is a significant tension between the psychological approach and a widely held model of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). According to this model, the individual personalities or alters that belong to someone with DID pos…Read more
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120The inclusion model of the incarnation: Problems and prospectsReligious Studies 37 (2): 125-141. 2001.Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne have recently defended what they call the ‘two-minds’ model of the Incarnation. This model, which I refer to as the ‘inclusion model’ or ‘inclusionism’, claims that Christ had two consciousnesses, a human and a divine consciousness, with the former consciousness contained within the latter one. I begin by exploring the motivation for, and structure of, inclusionism. I then develop a variety of objections to it: some philosophical, others theological in nature.…Read more
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Although the notion can be found in Anscombe
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391Self-consciousness and the unity of consciousnessThe Monist 87 (2): 219-236. 2004.Consciousness has a number of puzzling features. One such feature is its unity: the experiences and other conscious states that one has at a particular time seem to occur together in a certain way. I am currently enjoying visual experiences of my computer screen, auditory experiences of bird-song, olfactory experiences of coffee, and tactile experiences of feeling the ground beneath my feet. Conjoined with these perceptual experiences are proprioceptive experiences, experiences of agency, affect…Read more
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124Co-consciousness: Review of Barry Dainton's Stream of Consciousness (review)Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (3): 79-92. 2001.
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The multisensory nature of perceptual consciousnessIn Christopher Hill & David Bennett (eds.), Sensory Integration and the Unity of Consciousness, Mit Press. pp. 15-36. 2014.
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4Is Consciousnes Multisensory?In Dustin Stokes, Stephen Biggs & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. pp. 95-132. 2014.Is consciousness multisensory? Obviously it is multisensory in certain ways. Human beings typically possess the capacity to have experiences in at least the five familiar sensory modalities, and quite possibly in a number of other less commonly recognised modalities as well. But there are other respects in which it is far from obvious that consciousness is multisensory. This chapter is concerned with one such respect. Οur concern here is with whether consciousness contains experiences associated…Read more
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285Phenomenology and the feeling of doing : Wegner on the conscious willIn Susan Pockett (ed.), Does Consciousness Cause Behaviour?, Mit Press. 2004.Given its ubiquitous presence in everyday experience, it is surprising that the phenomenology of doing—the experience of being an agent—has received such scant attention in the consciousness literature. But things are starting to change, and a small but growing literature on the content and causes of the phenomenology of first-person agency is beginning to emerge.2 One of the most influential and stimulating figures in this literature is Daniel Wegner. In a series of papers and his book The Illu…Read more
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350In defence of the doxastic conception of delusionsMind and Language 20 (2): 163-88. 2005.In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot, instead, he merely imagines that she has, and mistakes this imagining for a belief. We argue that the metacognitive account is untenable, and that th…Read more
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377Phenomenology and delusions: Who put the 'alien' in alien control?Consciousness and Cognition 15 (3): 566-577. 2006.Current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusional beliefs are based on unusual experiences of various kinds. For example, it is argued that the Capgras delusion (the belief that a known person has been replaced by an impostor) is triggered by an abnormal affective experience in response to seeing a known person; loss of the affective response to a familiar person’s face may lead to the belief that the person has been replaced by an impostor (Ellis & Young, 1990). Similarly, the Co…Read more
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21Agentive experiences as pushmi-pullyu representationsIn Jesús H. Aguilar, Andrei A. Buckareff & Keith Frankish (eds.), New waves in philosophy of action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 219--36. 2010.
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1572Perception and the Reach of Phenomenal ContentPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (236): 385-404. 2009.The phenomenal character of perceptual experience involves the representation of colour, shape and motion. Does it also involve the representation of high-level categories? Is the recognition of a tomato as a tomato contained within perceptual phenomenality? Proponents of a conservative view of the reach of phenomenal content say ’No’, whereas those who take a liberal view of perceptual phenomenality say ’Yes’. I clarify the debate between conservatives and liberals, and argue in favour of the l…Read more
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343How to read mindsIn Sarah Richmond, Geraint Rees & Sarah J. L. Edwards (eds.), I know what you're thinking: brain imaging and mental privacy, Oxford University Press. pp. 41. 2012.Most animals have mental states of one sort or another, but few species share our capacity for self-awareness. We are aware of our own mental states via introspection, and we are aware of the mental states of our fellow human beings on the basis of what they do and say. This chapter is not concerned with these traditional forms of mind-reading—forms whose origins predate the beginnings of recorded history—but with the prospects of a rather different and significantly more recent form of ‘mind-re…Read more
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107Review of Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology, by Christopher Mole (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1). 2013.Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-4, Ahead of Print
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224After being sorely neglected for some time, consciousness is well and truly back on the philosophical and scientific agenda. This entry provides a whistle-stop tour of some recent debates surrounding consciousness, with a particular focus on issues relevant to the scientific study of consciousness. The first half of this entry (the first to fourth sections) focuses on clarifying the explanandum of a science of consciousness and identifying constraints on an adequate account of consciousness; the…Read more
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307The grounds of worshipReligious Studies 42 (3): 299-313. 2006.Although worship has a pivotal place in religious thought and practice, philosophers of religion have had remarkably little to say about it. In this paper we examine some of the many questions surrounding the notion of worship, focusing on the claim that human beings have obligations to worship God. We explore a number of attempts to ground our supposed duty to worship God, and argue that each is problematic. We conclude by examining the implications of this result, and suggest that it might be …Read more
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36Response to Commentators (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1): 223-229. 2013.
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1Monothematic delusions, empiricism, and framework beliefsPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (1): 1. 2004.
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362In _Consciousness and persons_, Michael Tye. Consciousness and persons. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) develops and defends a novel approach to the unity of consciousness. Rather than thinking of the unity of consciousness as involving phenomenal relations between distinct experiences, as standard accounts do, Tye argues that we should regard the unity of consciousness as involving relations between the contents of consciousness. Having developed an account of what it is for consciousness to be unif…Read more
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1Co-consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 8 (3): 79-92. 2001.This is a review of Barry Dainton's ‘Stream of Consciousness’. While much that is written about the unity of consciousness does, as Dainton says, traffic in vague metaphors and exaggerated claims, Dainton's book is a superb example of sober thinking and meticulous attention to detail. Stream of Consciousness can be roughly divided into three projects, projects that are bound together by co-consciousness. In the present context ‘co-consciousness’ refers to the relation that experiences have when…Read more
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1923The unity of consciousness and the split-brain syndromeJournal of Philosophy 105 (6): 277-300. 2008.According to conventional wisdom, the split-brain syndrome puts paid to the thesis that consciousness is necessarily unified. The aim of this paper is to challenge that view. I argue both that disunity models of the split-brain are highly problematic, and that there is much to recommend a model of the split-brain—the switch model—according to which split-brain patients retain a fully unified consciousness at all times. Although the task of examining the unity of consciousness through the lens of…Read more
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81Précis of The Unity of Consciousness (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1): 200-208. 2013.
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358In defence of genethical parityIn David Archard & David Benatar (eds.), Procreation and parenthood: the ethics of bearing and rearing children, Oxford University Press. 2010.Can a person be harmed or wronged by being brought into existence? Can a person be benefited by being brought into existence? Following David Heyd, I refer to these questions as “genethical questions”. This chapter examines three broad approaches to genethics: the no-faults model, the dual-benchmark model, and the parity model. The no-faults model holds that coming into existence is not properly subject to moral evaluation, at least so far as the interests of the person that is to be brought int…Read more
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93"Are you my mommy?" On the genetic basis of parenthoodJournal of Applied Philosophy 18 (3). 2001.What exactly is it that makes someone a parent? Many people hold that parenthood is grounded, in the first instance, in the natural derivation of one person's genetic constitution from the genetic constitutions of others. We refer to this view as "Geneticism". In Part I we distinguish three forms of geneticism on the basis of whether they hold that direct genetic derivation is sufficient, necessary, or both sufficient and necessary, for parenthood. Parts two through four examine three arguments …Read more
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651Delusions as Doxastic States: Contexts, Compartments, and CommitmentsPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 17 (4): 329-336. 2010.Although delusions are typically regarded as beliefs of a certain kind, there have been worries about the doxastic conception of delusions since at least Bleuler’s time. ‘Anti-doxasticists,’ as we might call them, do not merely worry about the claim that delusions are beliefs, they reject it. Reimer’s paper weighs into the debate between ‘doxasticists’ and ‘anti-doxasticists’ by suggesting that one of the main arguments given against the doxastic conception of delusions—what we might call the fu…Read more
Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |