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Freedom from Physics: Quantum Mechanics and Free WillIn Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: a guide and anthology, Oxford University Press Uk. 2004.
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76A companion to David Lewis (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2015.In _A Companion to David Lewis_, Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer bring together top philosophers to explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's seminal work in original ways. Students and scholars will discover the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through the diverse range of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. The first and only comprehensive study of the work of David…Read more
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116Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental CausationJournal of Philosophy 98 (6): 315. 2001.
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94Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Fred I. DretskePhilosophy of Science 49 (2): 297-300. 1982.
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25Comments on Jaegwon Kim’s M ind and the Physical WorldPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 655-662. 2002.NRP is a family of views differing by how they understand “reduction” and “physicalism.” Following Kim I understand the non-reduction as holding that some events and properties are distinct from any physical events and properties. A necessary condition for physicalism is that mental properties, events, and laws supervene on physical ones. Kim allows various understandings of “supervenience” but I think that physicalism requires at least the claim that any minimal physical duplicate of the actual…Read more
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24An argument for strong supervenienceIn Elias E. Savellos & Ümit D. Yalçin (eds.), Supervenience: New Essays, Cambridge University Press. pp. 218--225. 1995.
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140It is not so much a distinct and established academic discipline as it is a sort of boundary, a sort of frontier, across which theoretical physics and modern western philosophy have been interrogating and informing and unsettling one another, for something on the order of four hundred years now, about the character of matter, the nature of space and time, the question of determinism, meaning of chance, the possibility of knowledge, and much else besides.
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79Wanted Dead or Alive: Two Attempts to Solve Schrodinger's ParadoxPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990 277-285. 1990.We discuss two recent attempts two solve Schrodinger's cat paradox. One is the modal interpretation developed by Kochen, Healey, Dieks, and van Fraassen. It allows for an observable which pertains to a system to possess a value even when the system is not in an eigenstate of that observable. The other is a recent theory of the collapse of the wave function due to Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber. It posits a dynamics which has the effect of collapsing the state of macroscopic systems. We argue that t…Read more
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387David Lewis’s Humean Theory of Objective ChancePhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 1115--25. 2004.The most important theories in fundamental physics, quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, posit objective probabilities or chances. As important as chance is there is little agreement about what it is. The usual “interpretations of probability” give very different accounts of chance and there is disagreement concerning which, if any, is capable of accounting for its role in physics. David Lewis has contributed enormously to improving this situation. In his classic paper “A Subjectivist's …Read more
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174Comments on Jaegwon Kim’s Mind and the Physical WorldPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3). 2002.NRP is a family of views differing by how they understand “reduction” and “physicalism.” Following Kim I understand the non-reduction as holding that some events and properties are distinct from any physical events and properties. A necessary condition for physicalism is that mental properties, events, and laws supervene on physical ones. Kim allows various understandings of “supervenience” but I think that physicalism requires at least the claim that any minimal physical duplicate of the actual…Read more
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200Copenhagen versus Bohmian Interpretations of Quantum Theory1 (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 317-328. 1998.
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68Leibniz and the ontological argumentPhilosophical Studies 34 (1). 1978.According to leibniz, Descartes' ontological argument establishes that if God possibly exists then God exists. To complete the argument a proof that God possibly exists is required. Leibniz attempts a proof-Theoretic demonstration that 'god exists' is consistent and concludes from this that 'god possibly exists is true'. In this paper I formalize leibniz's argument in a system of modal logic. I show that a principle which leibniz implicitly uses, 'if a is consistent then a is possibly true' is e…Read more
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DeterminismIn Martin Curd & Stathis Psillos (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2008.
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211A guide to naturalizing semanticsIn C. Wright & Bob Hale (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell: Oxford. pp. 108-126. 1997.
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115The role of 'conceptual role semantics'Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23 (July): 305-15. 1982.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |