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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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37Response 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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363In _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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1930The 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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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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81Précis of The Unity of Consciousness (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (1): 200-208. 2013.
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359In 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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654Delusions 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
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2158The Phenomenology of AgencyPhilosophy Compass 3 (1): 182-202. 2008.The phenomenology of agency has, until recently, been rather neglected, overlooked by both philosophers of action and philosophers of consciousness alike. Thankfully, all that has changed, and of late there has been an explosion of interest in what it is like to be an agent. 1 This burgeoning field crosses the traditional boundaries between disciplines: philosophers of psychopathology are speculating about the role that unusual experiences of agency might play in accounting for disorders of thou…Read more
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Peer Commentary on ‘Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?’Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (1): 29-86. 2004.
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68Replies to CommentatorsAnalysis 74 (3): 520-529. 2014.This article is a response to commentaries by Chris Hill, Farid Masrour and Robert van Gulick on "The Unity of Consciousness" . Topics covered in the discussion include the phenomenal unity relation, the respect in which the unity of consciousness is a necessary feature of consciousness, and challenges to the idea that the self might be a merely virtual entity
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356Narrators and Comparators: The Architecture of Agentive Self-Awareness (review)Synthese 159 (3). 2007.This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a high-level, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent's narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production
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240Experience, belief, and the interpretive foldPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (1): 81-86. 2004.Elisabeth Pacherie is a research fellow in philosophy at Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Her main research and publications are in the areas of philosophy of mind, psychopathology and action theory. Her publications include a book on intentionality (_Naturaliser_ _l'intentionnalité_, Paris, PUF, 1993) and she is currently preparing a book on action and agency
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505The Unity of ConsciousnessOxford University Press UK. 2010.Tim Bayne draws on philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience in defence of the claim that consciousness is unified. He develops an account of what it means to say that consciousness is unified, and then applies this account to a variety of cases - drawn from both normal and pathological forms of experience - in which the unity of consciousness is said to break down. He goes on to explore the implications of the unity of consciousness for theories of consciousness, for the sense of embodiment, and…Read more
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221Chalmers on the Justification of Phenomenal JudgmentsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2): 407-419. 2001.We seem to enjoy a very special kind of epistemic relation to our own conscious states. In The Conscious Mind (TCM), David Chalmers argues that our phenomenal judgments are fully‐justified or certain because we are acquainted with the phenomenal states that are the objects of such judgments. Chalmers holds that the acquaintance account of phenomenal justification is superior to reliabilist accounts of how it is that our PJs are justified, because it alone can underwrite the certainty of our phen…Read more
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95Toward a pluralist account of parenthoodBioethics 17 (3). 2003.What is it that makes someone a parent? Many writers – call them ‘monists’– claim that parenthood is grounded solely in one essential feature that is both necessary and sufficient for someone's being a parent. We reject not only monism but also ‘necessity’ views, in which some specific feature is necessary but not also sufficient for parenthood. Our argument supports what we call ‘pluralism’, the view that any one of several kinds of relationship is sufficient for parenthood. We begin by challen…Read more
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13Potential PersonsIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.
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479Libet and the case for free will scepticismIn Richard Swinburne (ed.), Free Will and Modern Science, Oup/british Academy. 2011.Free will sceptics claim that we do not possess free will—or at least, that we do not possess nearly as much free will as we think we do. Some free will sceptics hold that the very notion of free will is incoherent, and that no being could possibly possess free will (Strawson this volume). Others allow that the notion of free will is coherent, but hold that features of our cognitive architecture prevent us from possessing free will. My concern in this chapter is with views of the second kind. Ac…Read more
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850Representationalism and the problem of vaguenessPhilosophical Studies 162 (1): 71-86. 2013.This paper develops a novel problem for representationalism (also known as "intentionalism"), a popular contemporary account of perception. We argue that representationalism is incompatible with supervaluationism, the leading contemporary account of vagueness. The problem generalizes to naive realism and related views, which are also incompatible with supervaluationism
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228Delusion and self-deception: Mapping the terrainIn Tim Bayne & Jordi Fernández (eds.), Delusion and Self-Deception: Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation, Psychology Press. pp. 1-21. 2009.The papers in this volume are drawn from a workshop on delusion and self-deception, held at Macquarie University in November of 2004. Our aim was to bring together theorists working on delusions and self-deception with an eye towards identifying and fostering connections—at both empirical and conceptual levels—between these domains. As the contributions to this volume testify, there are multiple points of contact between delusion and self-deception. This introduction charts the conceptual space …Read more
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162The Presence of Consciousness in Absence SeizuresBehavioural Neurology 24 (1): 47-53. 2011.Although the study of epileptic absence seizures has the potential to contribute a great deal to the scientific understanding of consciousness, this potential has yet to be fully exploited. There have been a number of insightful discussions of consciousness in the context of epileptic seizures, but the basic conceptual issues are still poorly understood and many empirical questions remain unexplored. In this paper I review a number of questions that are of interest to consciousness scientists an…Read more
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270Agency as a Marker of ConsciousnessIn Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein & Tillmann Vierkant (eds.), Decomposing the Will, Oxford Academic. pp. 160-180. 2013.One of the central problems in the study of consciousness concerns the ascription of consciousness. We want to know whether certain kinds of creatures—such as non-human animals, artificially created organisms, and even members of our own species who have suffered severe brain-damage—are conscious, and we want to know what kinds of conscious states these creatures might be in if indeed they are conscious. The identification of accurate markers of consciousness is essential if the science of consc…Read more
Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |