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156The Philosophy of psychologyIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2008.The 20 sup > th /sup > century has been a tumultuous time in psychology -- a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strateg…Read more
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254Evolution, culture, and the irrationality of the emotionsIn D. Evans & Pierre Cruse (eds.), Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, Oxford University Press. 2004.For about 2500 years, from Plato’s time until the closing decades of the 20th century, the dominant view was that the emotions are quite distinct from the processes of rational thinking and decision making, and are often a major impediment to those processes. But in recent years this orthodoxy has been challenged in a number of ways. Damasio (1994) has made a forceful case that the traditional view, which he has dubbed _Descartes’ Error_, is quite wrong, because emotions play a fundamental role …Read more
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223Philosophical Questions about the Nature of WillpowerPhilosophy Compass 5 (9). 2010.In this article, I survey four key questions about willpower: How is willpower possible? Why does willpower fail? How does willpower relate to other self-regulatory processes? and What are the connections between willpower and weakness of will? Empirical research into willpower is growing rapidly and yielding some fascinating new findings. This survey emphasizes areas in which empirical progress in understanding willpower helps to advance traditional philosophical debates.
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33Automatic goals and conscious regulation in social cognitive affective neuroscienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2): 156-157. 2014.
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157Telling More Than We Can Know About Intentional ActionMind and Language 26 (3): 353-380. 2011.Recently, a number of philosophers have advanced a surprising conclusion: people's judgments about whether an agent brought about an outcome intentionally are pervasively influenced by normative considerations. In this paper, we investigate the ‘Chairman case’, an influential case from this literature and disagree with this conclusion. Using a statistical method called structural path modeling, we show that people's attributions of intentional action to an agent are driven not by normative asses…Read more
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1850How is Willpower Possible? The Puzzle of Synchronic Self‐Control and the Divided MindNoûs 48 (1): 41-74. 2012.Peer Reviewed.
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38The 2014 Tanner Symposium features a panel of speakers discussing current research in the areas of volition and self-control and the effects of that research for issues of public policy.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |