•  35
    Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion The first in-depth philosophical analysis of personal hate and group hate, Hate: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion explores how personal hatred can foster domestic violence and emotional abuse, how hate-proneness is a main contributor to the aggressive tendencies of borderlines, narcissists and psychopaths, how seemingly ordinary people embark on some of history's worst hate crimes, and how cohesive groups, subjected to spontaneous forces o…Read more
  •  257
    Dogmatism and Ampliative Inference
    Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 66 (1). 2021.
    The evidential role of experience in justifying beliefs has been at the center of debate in philosophy in recent years. One view is that experience, or seeming, can confer immediate justification on belief in virtue of its representational phenomenology. Call this view “representational dogmatism.” Another view is that experience confers immediate justification on belief in virtue of its relational phenomenology. Call this view “relational dogmatism.” The goal of this paper is to pit these two v…Read more
  •  1
    Psychedelics: A Window into Perceptual Processing
    with Dimitria Gatzia Electra
    In Chris Letheby & Philip Gerrans (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Psychedelic Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    In this chapter, we first present findings indicating that psilocybin-induced visual distortions and impaired executive functioning originate in temporary disruptions of bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms. We then revisit a recent predictive processing account of psychedelic experiences and argue that it lacks the resources to provide an adequate account of psychedelic experiences. Lastly, we propose an alternative theory of perceptual processing that can explain how the psilocybin-in…Read more
  •  811
    Vices of Friendship
    with Arina Pismenny
    In Arina Pismenny & Berit Brogaard (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Love. pp. 231-253. 2022.
    In this paper, we argue that the neo-Aristotelian conception of “friendships of character” appears to misrepresent the essential nature of "genuine", or "true", friendship. We question the neo-Aristotelian imperative that true friendship entails disinterested love of the other “for their own sake” and strives at enhancing moral virtue. We propose an alternative conception of true friendship as involving affective and motivational features which we call closeness, intimacy, identity, and trust. E…Read more
  •  258
    Time and Tense
    In Bob Hale, Alex Miller & Crispin Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 765-786. 2017.
    Two of the main debates in philosophy of language concerning time and tense are the debate about the semantics of the tenses in the English language and the debate over whether propositions can be transiently true or false as opposed to always being eternally true or false. The latter quarrel is also known as the "temporalism–eternalism debate." Given standard semantics, the two debates are not logically independent, as we will see. Those who believe propositions are eternally true or false need…Read more
  •  21
    This book collects original essays by top scholars that address questions about the nature, origins, and effects of ambivalence. While the nature of agency has received an enormous amount of attention, relatively little has been written about ambivalence or how it relates to topics such as agency, rationality, justification, knowledge, autonomy, self-governance, well-being, social cognition, and various other topics. Ambivalence presents unique questions related to many major philosophical debat…Read more
  •  36
    The Moral Psychology of Love (edited book)
    Rowman and Littlefield. 2022.
    This book will explore the moral dimensions of love from the standpoint of political philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
  •  772
    Practical Identity and Duties of Love
    Disputatio 13 (60): 27-50. 2021.
    This paper defends the view that we have special relationship duties that do not derive from our moral duties. Our special relationship duties, I argue, are grounded in what I call close relationships. Sharing a close relationship with another person, I suggest, requires that both people conceive of themselves as being motivated to promote the other’s interests. So, staying true to oneself demands being committed to promoting the interests of those with whom we share a close relationship. Finall…Read more
  •  328
    In this paper I provide empirical and theoretical considerations in favor of a non-inferential view of speech comprehension. On the view defended, we typically comprehend speech by perceiving or grasping apparently conveyed meanings directly rather than by inferring them from, say, linguistic principles and perceived phonemes. “Speech” is here used in the broad sense to refer not only to verbal expression, but also written messages, including Braille, and conventional signs and symbols, like emo…Read more
  •  470
    Living High and Letting Die
    with Nicola Bourbaki and Barry Smith
    Philosophy 76 (297). 2001.
    Imagine that your body has become attached, without your permission, to that of a sick violinist. The violinist is a human being. He will die if you detach him. Such detachment seems, nonetheless, to be morally permissible. Thomson argues that an unwantedly pregnant woman is in an analogous situation. Her argument is considered by many to have established the moral permissibility of abortion even under the assumption that the foetus is a human being. Another popular argument is that presented by…Read more
  •  399
    Living high and letting die
    Philosophy 76 (3): 435-442. 2001.
    Imagine that your body has become attached, without your permission, to that of a sick violinist. The violinist is a human being. He will die if you detach him. Such detachment seems, nonetheless, to be morally permissible. Thomson argues that an unwantedly pregnant woman is in an analogous situation. Her argument is considered by many to have established the moral permissibility of abortion even under the assumption that the foetus is a human being. Another popular argument is that presented by…Read more
  •  132
    Female Misogyny
    The Philosophers' Magazine 91 53-59. 2020.
    Misogyny is a particular kind of unjustified hatred or contempt for women in a man’s world. By “a man’s world,” I mean a society where men have more power and privileges than women. The United States is a man’s world, or “patriarchal society,” as it’s also called. A few pieces of evidence: In 2019, 127 women held seats in the United States Congress, comprising only 23.7 percent of the 535 members. We, the American people, have never elected a female president. Although some women are legally ent…Read more
  •  807
    Sixteen days
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28 (1). 2003.
    When does a human being begin to exist? We argue that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. We lay down a set of conditions for being a human being, and we determine when, in the course of normal fetal development, these conditions are first satisfied. Issues dealt with along the way include: modes of substance-formation, twinning, the nature of the intra-uterine environment, and the nature of the rel…Read more
  •  109
    Foundationalism
    In Sven Bernecker & Kourken Michaelian (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Memory, Routledge. pp. 296-309. 2017.
    Memory has eluded a unified philosophical analysis for millennia because memory isn’t a single type of mental state. On a standard classification, procedural memory is memory of how to do things, semantic memory is memory of facts or fact-like propositions and episodic memory is memory of events in which you partook. Autobiographical memory is memory of what happened in your past in real-life cases. Empirical studies suggest that autobiographical memory is a construction of pieces of past experi…Read more
  •  413
    Cognitive Dissonance and the Logic of Racism
    In Berit Brogaard & Dimitria Gatzia (eds.), The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence: Being of Two Minds, Routledge. pp. 219-243. 2021.
    Cognitive dissonance is a kind of ambivalence in which your apprehension of the fact that you performed or want to perform an action of which you disapprove gives rise to psychological distress. This, in turn, causes you to solicit unconscious processes that can help you reduce the distress. Here we look at the role that cognitive dissonance plays in explaining the inner workings of racism. We distinguish between three types of racist acts: inadvertent bigotry, habitual racism, and explicit raci…Read more
  •  801
    Implicit biases in visually guided action
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 17). 2021.
    For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in the primary visual cortex: a ventral, perception-related ‘conscious’ stream and a dorsal, action-related ‘unconscious’ stream. They furthermore maintain that the perceptual and memory systems in the ventral stream are relatively shielded from the action system in the dorsal stream. In recent years, this view has come un…Read more
  •  165
    Molyneux’s Question and the Semantics of Seeing
    In G. Ferretti & B. Glenney (eds.), Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 195-215. 2021.
    The aim of this chapter is to shed new light on the question of what newly sighted subjects are capable of seeing on the basis of previous experience with mind- independent, external objects and their properties through touch alone. This question is also known as "Molyneux’s question." Much of the empirically driven debate surrounding this question has been centered on the nature of the representational content of the subjects' visual experiences. It has generally been assumed that the meaning o…Read more
  •  1149
    Integration information theories posit that the integration of information is necessary and/or sufficient for consciousness. In this paper, we focus on three of the most prominent information integration theories: Information Integration Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and Attended Intermediate-Level Theory. We begin by explicating each theory and key concepts they utilize. We then argue that the current evidence indicates that the integration of information is neither necessary nor sufficient …Read more
  •  86
    The Epistemology of Non-visual Perception (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    This is an anthology of new papers by top researchers in epistemology and philosophy of mind focused on the epistemology of non-visual perception. The focus of the volume is to highlight the many different domains in which non-visual sensory experience, broadly construed to include multimodal experience associated with emotional and agential perception, plays a rational role, for instance, as an immediate justifier of belief.
  •  886
    Color Synesthesia
    with Dimitria Gatzia and Jennifer J. Matey
    In Renzo Shamey (ed.), Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology 2nd Edition., Springer. pp. 1-7. 2019.
    Encyclopedia entry on color synesthesia with cognitive/neurscientific focus
  •  61
    This volume provides novel approaches to a variety of questions about ambivalence and the role it plays in our lives. As the contributions illustrate, ambivalence finds its way into a gamut of philosophical and psychological debates about rationality, skepticism, emotions, intentionality, racism, global justice, well-being, mindfulness, and intersubjectivity. These debates concern questions like: “Is ambivalence distinct from uncertainty?”, “Does ambivalence affect the way we respond to paradoxe…Read more
  •  445
    It's Not What it Seems. A Semantic Account of ‘Seems’ and Seemings
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (2-3): 210-239. 2013.
    I start out by reviewing the semantics of ‘seem’. As ‘seem’ is a subject-raising verb, ‘it seems’ can be treated as a sentential operator. I look at the semantic and logical properties of ‘it seems’. I argue that ‘it seems’ is a hyperintensional and contextually flexible operator. The operator distributes over conjunction but not over disjunction, conditionals or semantic entailments. I further argue that ‘it seems’ does not commute with negation and does not agglomerate with conjunction. I then…Read more
  •  16
    In this book, Brit Brogaard defends the view that visual experience is like belief in having a representational content. Her defense differs from most previous defenses of this view in that it begins by looking at the language of ordinary speech. She provides a linguistic analysis of what we say when we say that things look a certain way or that the world appears to us to be a certain way. She then argues that this analysis can be used to argue for the view that visual experience has a represent…Read more
  •  149
    The real epistemic significance of perceptual learning
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (5-6): 543-558. 2018.
    In "The Epistemic Significance of Perceptual Learning," Elijah Chudnoff (this issue) argues that cases from perceptual learning show that perception not only generates reasons for beliefs but also preserves those reasons over time in perceptual learning cases. In this paper, we dispute the idea that perceptual learning enables the preservation of perceptual reasons. We then argue for an alternative view, viz. the view that perceptual learning is epistemically significant insofar as it modifies o…Read more
  •  1033
    Sex By Deception
    In Manuel Vargas & John Doris (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 683-711. 2022.
    In this paper I will use sex by deception as a case study for highlighting some of the most tricky concepts around sexuality and moral psychology, including rape, consensual sex, sexual rights, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, and disrespectful sex. I begin with a discussion of morally wrong sex as rooted in the breach of five sexual liberty rights that are derived from our fundamental human liberty rights: sexual self-possession, sexual autonomy, sexual individuality, sexual dignity and s…Read more
  •  44
    Seeing things
    Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 55-72. 2017.
  • Routledge Handbook of Consciousness
    with Elijah Chudnoff
    Routledge. 2020.