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207Knowledge of PerceptionIn Declan Smithies & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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333Philosophy of Mind: Consciousness, Intentionality and IgnoranceIn Barry Dainton & Howard Robinson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic. 2013.
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794Lewis on Materialism and ExperienceIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.This chapter reviews four elements of David Lewis's account of materialism and experience. These elements include: materialism for which Lewis gave a distinctive and well‐known characterization; an account of what experience is; an account of the source of the tension between experience and materialism; and a strategy for resolving the tension. Lewis did not just give a distinctive and well‐known characterization of materialism, he gave two: one in terms of fundamental properties, and one in ter…Read more
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484Russellian Monism or Nagelian Monism?In Torin Andrew Alter & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism, Oxford University Press. 2015.
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448In Praise of PoiseIn Adam Pautz & Daniel Stoljar (eds.), Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, Mit Press. 2019.
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773Panpsychism and Non-standard Materialism: Some Comparative RemarksIn William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, Routledge. 2019.Much of contemporary philosophy of mind is marked by a dissatisfaction with the two main positions in the field, standard materialism and standard dualism, and hence with the search for alternatives. My concern in this paper is with two such alternatives. The first, which I will call non-standard materialism, is a position I have defended in a number of places, and which may take various forms. The second, panpsychism, has been defended and explored by a number of recent writers. My main goals …Read more
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473Is there Progress in Philosophy? A Brief Case for OptimismIn Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.), Philosophy's Future: The Problem of Philosophical Progress, Wiley-blackwell. 2017.This chapter sets out an optimistic view of philosophical progress.The key idea is that the historical record speaks in favor of there being progress at least if we are clear about what philosophical problems are, and what it takes to solve them. I end by asking why so many people tend toward a pessimistic view of philosophical progress.
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501The Knowledge Argument and Two Interpretations of 'Knowing What it's Like'In Dale Jacquette (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness, Bloomsbury Academic. 2017.
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30Terence Horgan, Marcelo Sabatés, and David Sosa (eds.): Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes from the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1. 2016.Review of Horgan, Sabatés, and Sosa's (eds.) *Qualia and Mental Causation in a Physical World: Themes from the Philosophy of Jaegwon Kim*.
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894The Epistemic Approach to the Problem of ConsciousnessIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford University Press. 2020.
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93Philip Goff: Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1. 2018.This is a review of Philip Goff's *Consciousness and Fundamental Reality*.
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957Armstrong's Just-so Story about ConsciousnessIn Peter R. Anstey & David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.), Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2022.Abstract: In chapter 15 of A Materialist Theory of the Mind, D.M.Armstrong offers an account of what he calls “the biological value of introspection”, namely, that “without information…about the current state of our minds, purposive trains mental activity would be impossible.” This paper examines and assesses Armstrong’s “Just-so story about introspective consciousness”—as W.G.Lycan later called it. One moral will be that appreciating this aspect of Armstrong’s view blurs the difference between…Read more
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486A Euthyphro Dilemma for Higher-order Theories of ConsciousnessIn G. Rabin (ed.), Grounding and Consciousness, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.Abstract: According to a higher-order theory of consciousness, you are in a conscious (psychological) state if and only if you are conscious of being in that state. This paper develops and discusses a Euthyphro dilemma for theories of this sort; that is, a dilemma which asks whether the state is conscious because you are conscious of being in it, or, alternatively, whether you are conscious of being in it because it is conscious. I focus on two different versions of the higher-order theory: th…Read more
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30Physicalism and Its Discontents (review)Philosophical Review 112 (3): 422-424. 2003.This is a book of new essays by different authors on physicalism. The essays are divided into three sections. In the first, the papers are, the editors say, “generally sympathetic” to physicalism. The opening paper, by Papineau, is a compelling historical discussion of the thesis of the completeness of physics, together with the suggestion that an appreciation of the empirical basis of this thesis led to the widespread acceptance of physicalism itself in the second part of the twentieth century.…Read more
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666Philosophy as Synchronic HistoryJournal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (2): 155-172. 2021.Bernard Williams argues that philosophy is in some deep way akin to history. This article is a novel exploration and defense of the Williams thesis —though in a way anathema to Williams himself. The key idea is to apply a central moral from what is sometimes called the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s to the philosophy of philosophy of today, namely, the separation of explanation and laws. I suggest that an account of causal explanation offered by David Lewis may be modified to bring …Read more
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236Emotivism and truth conditionsPhilosophical Studies 70 (1). 1993.By distinguishing between pragmatic and semantic aspects of emotivism, and by distinguishing between inflationary and deflationary conceptions of truth conditions, this paper defends emotivism against a series of objections. First, it is not the case (as Blackburn has argued) that emotivism must explain the appearance that moral sentences have truth conditions. Second, it is not the case (as Boghossian has argued) that emotivism presupposes that non-moral sentences have inflationary truth condit…Read more
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224Chalmers v ChalmersNoûs 54 (2): 469-487. 2020.This paper brings out an inconsistency between David Chalmers's dualism, which is the main element of his philosophy of mind, and his structuralism, which is the main element of his epistemology. The point is ad hominem , but the inconsistency if it can be established is of considerable independent interest. For the best response to the inconsistency, I argue, is to adopt what Chalmers calls ‘type‐C Materialism’, a version of materialism that has been much discussed in recent times because of it…Read more
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32Dispositions (review)Mind 114 (453): 178-180. 2005.This is a review of Mumford's *Dispositions*
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70Williamson on Laws and Progress in PhilosophyEpistemology and Philosophy of Science 56 (2): 37-42. 2019.Williamson rejects the stereotype that there is progress in science but none in philosophy on the grounds (a) that it assumes that in science progress consists in the discovery of universal laws and (b) that this assumption is false, since in both science and philosophy progress consists at least sometimes in the development of better models. I argue that the assumption is false for a more general reason as well: that progress in both science and philosophy consists in the provision of better in…Read more
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132Understanding self‐ascriptionMind and Language 35 (2): 141-155. 2020.David Lewis argues that believing something is self‐ascribing a property rather than holding true a proposition. But what is self‐ascription? Is it some new mysterious primitive? Is Lewis saying that every belief you have is about you? Several recent authors have suggested that, in the light of these questions, Lewis's theory should be rejected, despite its enormous influence. But this neglects the fact that Lewis makes two relevant proposals about belief: one about belief de se , another about …Read more
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61Two Conceivability Arguments ComparedProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt1): 27-44. 2007.This paper compares and contrasts two conceivability arguments: the zombie argument (ZA) against physicalism, and the perfect actor argument (AA) against behaviourism. I start the paper by assuming that the arguments are of the same kind, and that AA is sound. On the basis of these two assumptions I criticize the most common philosophical suggestions in the literature today about what is wrong with ZA, and what is right in it. I end the paper by suggesting that the comparison between the two arg…Read more
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95Does the Exclusion Argument Put Any Pressure on Dualism?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1): 96-108. 2017.The exclusion argument is widely thought to put considerable pressure on dualism, if not to refute it outright. We argue to the contrary that, whether or not their position is ultimately true, dualists have a plausible response. The response focuses on the notion of ‘distinctness’ that is employed to distinguish between mental and physical properties: if ‘distinctness’ is understood in one way, the exclusion principle on which the argument rests can be denied by the dualist; if it is understood …Read more
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131The Regress Objection to Reflexive Theories of ConsciousnessAnalytic Philosophy 59 (3): 293-308. 2018.According to a reflexive theory of consciousness, a person is in a conscious state only if they are conscious of, or aware of, being in the state. This paper reconsiders the well-known regress objection against theories of this sort, according to which they entail that if you are in one conscious state, you are in an infinity of such states. I distinguish two versions of the reflexive theory, a cognitive version and a phenomenal version, and argue that, while the cognitive version of the refle…Read more
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257Two Conceptions of the PhysicalPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2): 253-281. 2001.The debate over physicalism in philosophy of mind can be seen as concerning an inconsistent tetrad of theses: (1) if physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true; (2) a priori physicalism is false; (3) if physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true; (4) epiphenomenalism is false. This paper argues that one may resolve the debate by distinguishing two conceptions of the physical: on the theory‐based conception, it is plausible that (2) is true and (3) is false; on the object‐based concept…Read more
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244Does Nagel's footnote eleven solve the mind-body problem?Philosophical Issues 20 (1): 125-143. 2010.
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163Evans on transparency: a rationalist accountPhilosophical Studies 176 (8): 2067-2085. 2019.Gareth Evans famously observed that he can answer the question ‘Do you think there is going to be a third world war?’ by attending to “precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question ‘Will there be a third world war?’”. I argue that this observation follows from two independently plausible ideas in philosophy of mind. The first is about rationality and consciousness: it is that to be rational is in part to be required to believe that you are in a consci…Read more
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443Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable OptimismOxford University Press. 2017.Many people believe that philosophy makes no progress. Members of the general public often find it amazing that philosophers exist in universities at all, at least in research positions. Academics who are not philosophers often think of philosophy either as a scholarly or interpretative enterprise, or else as a sort of pre-scientific speculation. And many well-known philosophers argue that there is little genuine progress in philosophy. Daniel Stoljar argues that this is all a big mistake. When…Read more
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38Crimmins, Gonzales and MooreAnalysis 61 (3): 208-213. 2001.Gonzales tells Mark Crimmins (1992) that Crimmins knows him under two guises, and that under his other guise Crimmins thinks him an idiot. Knowing his cleverness, but not knowing which guise he has in mind, Crimmins trusts Gonzales but does not know which of his beliefs to revise. He therefore asserts to Gonzales. (FBI) I falsely believe that you are an idiot.
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 |