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497PhysicalismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.Physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on, or is necessitated by, the physical. The thesis is usually intended as a metaphysical thesis, parallel to the thesis attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, that everything is water, or the idealism of the 18th Century philosopher Berkeley, that everything is mental. The general idea is that the nature of the actual world (i.e. the universe and every…Read more
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169Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of ConsciousnessOxford University Press USA. 2006.Ignorance and Imagination advances a novel way to resolve the central philosophical problem about the mind: how it is that consciousness or experience fits into a larger naturalistic picture of the world. The correct response to the problem, Stoljar argues, is not to posit a realm of experience distinct from the physical, nor to deny the reality of phenomenal experience, nor even to rethink our understanding of consciousness and the language we use to talk about it. Instead, we should view the p…Read more
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191Comments on Galen Strawson - 'realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychismJournal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11): 170-176. 2006.
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The Content of PhysicalismDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995.Many philosophers of mind are concerned to defend the thesis called physicalism ; many others are concerned to refute it. Nevertheless, there is no generally agreed on idea of what physicalism is, and why it should matter whether the mental is physical. My thesis consists of four essays whose concern is with what physicalism is in its most plausible version, and what the importance of the thesis might be for the philosophy of mind. ;I begin with the question of whether it is possible to hold phy…Read more
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300Introspection and Consciousness (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2012.The topic of introspection stands at the interface between questions in epistemology about the nature of self-knowledge and questions in the philosophy of mind about the nature of consciousness. What is the nature of introspection such that it provides us with a distinctive way of knowing about our own conscious mental states? And what is the nature of consciousness such that we can know about our own conscious mental states by introspection? How should we understand the relationship between con…Read more
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97Response to Alter and BennettPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3): 775-784. 2009.The paper responds to criticisms of *Ignorance and Imagination* offered by Torin Alter and Karen Bennett
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104Précis of ignorance and imaginationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3): 748-755. 2009.
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301The Semantics of ‘What it’s like’ and the Nature of ConsciousnessMind 125 (500): 1161-1198. 2016.This paper defends a novel view of ‘what it is like’-sentences, according to which they attribute certain sorts of relations—I call them ‘affective relations’—that hold between events and individuals. The paper argues in detail for the superiority of this proposal over other views that are prevalent in the literature. The paper further argues that the proposal makes better sense than the alternatives of the widespread use of Nagel’s definition of conscious states and that it also shows the mista…Read more
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103ConsciousnessIn Jessica Pfeifer & Sohartra Sarkar (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, . pp. 158-163. 2005.Consciousness is extremely familiar yet it is at the limits—beyond the limits, some would say—of what one can sensibly talk about or explain. Perhaps this is the reason its study has drawn contributions from many fields including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology, cultural and literary theory, artificial intelligence, physics, and others. The focus of this entry is on: the varieties of consciousness, different problems that have been raised about these varieties, and prospects f…Read more
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190The argument from revelationIn Robert Nola & David Braddon Mitchell (eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, Mit Press. 2009.1. Introduction The story of Canberra, the capital of Australia, is roughly as follows. In 1901, when what is called
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57Review of Colin McGinn, Consciousness and its Objects (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (2). 2005.
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149Introspection and NecessityNoûs 52 (2): 389-410. 2018.What is the connection between being in a conscious mental state and believing that you yourself are currently in that state? On the one hand, it is natural to think that this connection is, or involves, a necessary connection of some sort. On the other hand, it is hard to know what the nature of this necessary connection is. For there are plausible arguments according to which this connection is not metaphysically necessary, not rationally necessary, and not merely naturally necessary. If these…Read more
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99Distinctions in distinctionIn Jesper Kallestrup & Jakob Hohwy (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Causation and Explanation in the Special Sciences, Oxford University Press. 2007.This chapter begins with a putative puzzle between non-reductive physicalism according to which psychological properties are distinct from, yet metaphysically necessitated by, physical properties, and Hume's dictum according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. However, the puzzle dissolves once care is taken to distinguish between distinct kinds of distinction: numerical distinctness, mereological distinctness, and what the chapter calls ‘weak modal distinctn…Read more
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189The Consequences Of IntentionalismErkenntnis 66 (1-2): 247-270. 2007.This article explores two consequences of intentionalism. My first line of argument focuses on the impact of intentionalism on the 'hard problem' of phenomenal character. If intentionalism is true, the phenomenal supervenes on the intentional. Furthermore, if physicalism about the intentional is also true, the intentional supervenes on the physical. Therefore, if intentionalism and physicalism are both true, then, by transitivity of supervenience, physicalism about the phenomenal is true. I argu…Read more
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207Is there a Lockean argument against expressivism?Analysis 63 (1): 76-86. 2003.It is sometimes suggested that expressivism in meta-ethics is to be criticized on grounds which do not themselves concern meta-ethics in particular, but which rather concern philosophy of language more generally. Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit (1998; see also Jackson and Pettit 1999, and Jackson 2001) have recently advanced a novel version of such an argument. They begin by noting that expressivism in its central form makes two claims—that ethical sentences are not truth evaluable, and that to …Read more
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75Should Moore Have Followed His Own Method?Philosophical Studies 129 (3): 609-618. 2006.I discuss Soames’s proposal that Moore could have avoided a central problem in his moral philosophy if he had utilized a method he himself pioneered in epistemology. The problem in Moore’s moral philosophy concerns what it is for a moral claim to be self-evident. The method in Moore’s epistemology concerns not denying the obvious. In review of the distance between something’s being self-evident and its being obvious, it is suggested that Soames’s proposal is mistaken.
Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphilosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |