Cambridge University
Faculty of Philosophy
PhD, 1992
College Station, Texas, United States of America
  •  9
    In this paper I explore a justification for transcendental idealism that emerges from the dialogue with philosophical scepticism in which Kant is on and off engaged throughout the Critique of Pure Reason. Many commentators, most prominently Strawson, have claimed that transcend‐ ental idealism is an unfortunate addition to the Critique, one that can profitably be excised in the interests of clarity and coherence. Against this general picture I urge that transcendental idealism is in fact a very …Read more
  •  12
    Thinking Without Words: An Overview for Animal Ethics
    The Journal of Ethics 11 (3): 319-335. 2007.
    In Thinking without Words I develop a philosophical framework for treating some animals and human infants as genuine thinkers. This paper outlines the aspects of this account that are most relevant to those working in animal ethics. There is a range of different levels of cognitive sophistication in different animal species, in addition to limits to the types of thought available to non-linguistic creatures, and it may be important for animal ethicists to take this into account in exploring issu…Read more
  • No Title available: Reviews
    Economics and Philosophy 26 (1): 95-101. 2010.
  •  13
    Consciousness, higher-order thought, and stimulus reinforcement
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2): 194-195. 2000.
    Rolls defends a higher-order thought theory of phenomenal consciousness, mapping the distinction between conscious and non-conscious states onto a distinction between two types of action and corresponding neural pathways. Only one type of action involves higher-order thought and consequently consciousness. This account of consciousness has implausible consequences for the nature of stimulus-reinforcement learning.
  •  2
    Nietzsche and the tradition (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 5 (2): 402-414. 1997.
    Nietzsche and Modern Times: A study of Bacon, Descartes and Nietzsche. Laurence Lampert. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 475. £35.00 Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Peter Poellner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xi + 320
  •  10
    The Force-field Puzzle and Mindreading in Non-human Primates
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3): 397-410. 2011.
    What is the relation between philosophical theorizing and experimental data? A modest set of naturalistic assumptions leads to what I term the force-field puzzle. The assumption that philosophy is continuous with natural science, as captured in Quine’s force-field metaphor, seems to push us simultaneously towards thinking that there have to be conceptual constraints upon how we interpret experimental data and towards thinking that there cannot be such conceptual constraints, because all theorizi…Read more
  •  19
    Bodily awareness and self-consciousness
    with IV Objections
    In Shaun Gallagher (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the self, Oxford University Press. 2011.
    This article argues that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. It clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, categorises the different types of body-relative information, and rejects the claim that we can have a sense of ownership of our own bodies. It explores how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and highlights the importance of certain forms of bodily awareness that share an imp…Read more
  •  4
    Language and Equilibrium
    Philosophical Review 121 (2): 294-298. 2012.
  •  15
    Syntax, semantics, and levels of explanation
    Philosophical Quarterly 45 (180): 361-367. 1995.
  •  171
    Myin, Erik (2000) Direct Self-Consciousness (2)Bermúdez, José Luis (2000) Concepts and the Priority Principle (10)Bermúdez, José Luis (2000) Circularity, "I"-Thoughts and the Linguistic Requirement for Concept Possession (11)Meeks, Roblin R. (2000) Withholding Immunity: Misidentification, Misrepresentation, and Autonomous Nonconceptual Proprioceptive First-Person Content (12)Newen, Albert (2001) Kinds of Self-Consciousness (13)Bermudez, Jose Luis (2000) Direct Self-Consciousness (4)Bermudez, Jos…Read more
  •  8
    'I'-thoughts and explanation: Reply to Garrett
    Philosophical Quarterly 53 (212). 2003.
    Brian Garrett has criticized my diagnosis of the paradox of self-consciousness. In reply, I focus on the classification of 'I'-thoughts, and show how the notion of immunity to error through misidentification can be used to characterize 'I'-thoughts, even though an important class of 'I'-thoughts (those whose expression involves what Wittgenstein called the use of 'I' as object) are not themselves immune to error through misidentification. 'I'-thoughts which are susceptible to error through misid…Read more
  •  12
    Rationality, logic, and fast and frugal heuristics
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 744-745. 2000.
    Gigerenzer and his co-workers make some bold and striking claims about the relation between the fast and frugal heuristics discussed in their book and the traditional norms of rationality provided by deductive logic and probability theory. We are told, for example, that fast and frugal heuristics such as “Take the Best” replace “the multiple coherence criteria stemming from the laws of logic and probability with multiple correspondence criteria relating to real-world decision performance.” This …Read more
  •  6
    Cartesian Skepticism: Arguments and Antecedents
    In John Greco (ed.), The Oxford handbook of skepticism, Oxford University Press. 2008.
    The most frequently discussed skeptical arguments in the history of philosophy are to be found in the tightly argued twelve paragraphs of Descartes’ Meditation One. There is considerable controversy about how to interpret the skeptical arguments that Descartes offers; the extent to which those arguments rest upon implicit epistemological and/or metaphysical presuppositions; their originality within the history of skepticism; and the role they play within Cartesian philosophy and natural science.…Read more
  •  2
    Nonconceptual mental content
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2003.
  • Book Reviews (review)
    Mind 105 (418): 357-362. 1996.
  •  8
    Memory judgments and immunity to error through misidentification
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 84 (1): 123-142. 2012.
    First person judgments that are immune to error through misidentifi cation (IEM) are fundamental to self-conscious thought. The IEM status of many such judgments can be understood in terms of the possession conditions of the concepts they involve. However, this approach cannot be extended to first person judgments based on autobiographical memory. Th e paper develops an account of why such judgments have the IEM property and how thinkers are able to exploit this fact in inference.
  • The concept of decadence
    In José Luis Bermúdez & Sebastian Gardner (eds.), Art and Morality, Routledge. 2002.
  •  7
    Animal reasoning and proto-logic
    In Susan Hurley & Matthew Nudds (eds.), Rational Animals?, Oxford University Press. pp. 127-137. 2006.
  •  1
    Is the Postmodern World a Nietzschean World?
    International Studies in Philosophy 27 (2): 1-14. 1995.
  •  6
    Self-consciousness
    In Max Velmans & Susan Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.
    Self‐consciousness is a topic located at the intersection of a range of different philosophical concerns. One set of concerns is metaphysical. Another is epistemological. When discussing the phenomenon of consciousness in general, philosophers generally think it possible to give an account of consciousness that is independent of how one understands the objects, properties, and events of which one is conscious. Self‐consciousness is important because of the role it plays in the cognitive economy.…Read more