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154Onstage IllocutionJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (3). 2009.performances. But comparatively little work has been by way of elucidating such speech acts,[1] and without an adequate account of them, such comparisons will ultimately prove to be empty. In this paper, I will defend an illocutionary pretense view, according to which actors pretend to perform various kinds of illocutionary acts rather than genuinely performing them. This is, of course, a fairly intuitive position to take. What I want to argue, however, is that this is the route one must take: t…Read more
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131Are Functional Properties Causally Potent?Sorites 17 49-55. 2006.Kim has defended a solution to the exclusion problem which deploys the «causal inheritance principle» and the identification of instantiations of mental properties with instantiations of their realizing physical properties. I wish to argue that Kim's putative solution to the exclusion problem rests on an equivocation between instantiations of properties as bearers of properties and instantiations as property instances. On the former understanding, the causal inheritance principle is too weak to …Read more
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130Transparent Representation: Photography and the Art of CastingJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (1): 9-18. 2012.
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181Mad, Martian, but not mad Martian painSorites 15 (December): 73-75. 2004.Functionalism cannot accommodate the possibility of mad pain—pain whose causes and effects diverge from those of the pain causal role. This is because what it is to be in pain according to functionalism is simply to be in a state that occupies the pain role. And the identity theory cannot accommodate the possibility of Martian pain—pain whose physical realization is foot-cavity inflation rather than C-fibre activation (or whatever physiological state occupies the pain-role in normal humans). Aft…Read more
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134For the ubiquity of nonactual fact-telling narratorsJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (4). 2007.
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681Egan argues against Lewis’s view that properties are sets of actual and possible individuals and in favour of the view that they are functions from worlds to extensions (sets of individuals). Egan argues that Lewis’s view implies that 2nd order properties are never possessed contingently by their (1st order) bearers, an implication to which there are numerous counter-examples. And Egan argues that his account of properties is more commensurable with the role they play as the semantic values of p…Read more
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10In this chapter, a positive account of reader engagement with fiction will developed. According to this picture, the basic reader attitude towards fictional works is imaginative. But, in my view, engagement with fiction does not require any de se imagining on the part of readers; it requires only de dicto and de re imagining. The account of reader engagement is modelled on the attitudes of story-listeners to the stories to which they listen and the performers who tell them. In engaged reading, h…Read more
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214Word-Sculpture, Speech Acts, and FictionalityJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (4): 389-399. 2010.A common approach to drawing boundary between fiction and non-fiction is by appeal to the kinds of speech acts performed by authors of works of the respective categories. Searle, for example, takes fiction to be the product of illocutionary pretense of various kinds on the part of authors and non-fiction to be the product of genuine illocutionary action.1 Currie, in contrast, takes fiction to be the product of sui generis fictional illocutionary action on the part of authors and non-fiction to b…Read more
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199Leave me out of it: De re, but not de se, imaginative engagement with fictionJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (4). 2006.I have been dissatisfied with Walton’s make-believe model of appreciator engagement with fiction ever since my first encounter with it as a graduate student.1 What I have always objected to is not the suggestion that such engagement is broadly speaking imaginative; rather, it is the suggestion that it specifically involves de se imaginative activity on the part of appreciators. That is, while I concede that appreciators imagine (de re) of the fictional works they experience that they are thus an…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
| Metaphysics |
| Philosophy of Language |
| Philosophy of Mind |
| Aesthetics |
Areas of Interest
| Metaphysics |
| Philosophy of Language |
| Philosophy of Mind |
| Aesthetics |