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150Mind-body interaction and supervenient causationMidwest Studies in Philosophy 9 (1): 271-81. 1984.The mind-body problem arises because of our status as double agents apparently en rapport both with the mental and with the physical. We think, desire, decide, plan, suffer passions, fall into moods, are subject to sensory experiences, ostensibly perceive, intend, reason, make believe, and so on. We also move, have a certain geographical position, a certain height and weight, and we are sometimes hit or cut or burned. In other words, human beings have both minds and bodies. What is the relation …Read more
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45The status of becoming: What is happening now?Journal of Philosophy 76 (1): 26-42. 1979.What is the ontological status of temporal becoming, of the present, or the now? We shall consider in turn four answers to this question: (i) the objective-property doctrine, (ii) the thought-reflexive analysis, (iii) the tensed-exemplification view, and (iv) the form-of-thought account.
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1Plantinga on Epistemic InternalismIn Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology, Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 73-87. 1996.
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230How Must Knowledge Be Modally Related to What Is Known?Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2): 373-384. 1999.
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31Roderick Milton Chisholm 1916-1999Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 72 (5). 1999.
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87The essentials of personsDialectica 53 (3-4): 227-41. 1999.This paper tries to clarify the nature of philosophical questions as to the ontological nature of things, especially persons. It considers implications of an Aristotelian account, which leads to an ontology that makes subjects and other things epistemologically remote. This makes the account doubtfully reconcilable with the special epistemic relation that each of us has to oneself, via for example the cogito.
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7Philosophical Issues, Action TheoryWiley-Blackwell. 2012.This is a collection of papers on action theory, very broadly conceived. It contains cutting-edge work by some of the most important contributors in the field
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971For the Love of Truth?In Linda Zagzebski & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 49-62. 2000.Rational beings pursue and value truth . Intellectual conduct is to be judged, accordingly, by how well it aids our pursuit of that ideal. I ask whether these platitudes mean, and whether they are true.
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331Rational intuition: Bealer on its nature and epistemic statusPhilosophical Studies 81 (2-3): 151--162. 1996.A discussion of George Bealer's conception and defense of rational intuition as a basis of philosophical knowledge, under three main heads: a) the phenomenology of intellectual intuition; b) the status of such intuition as a basic source of evidence, and the explanation of what gives it that status; and c) the defense of intuition against those who would reject it and exclude it on principle from the set of valid sources of evidence.
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233Knowledge and Intellectual VirtueThe Monist 68 (2): 226-245. 1985.An intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error; or so let us assume for now, though a more just conception may include as desiderata also generality, coherence, and explanatory power, unless the value of these is itself explained as derivative from the character of their contribution precisely to one’s surplus of truth over error. This last is an issue I mention in order to lay it aside. Here we assume only a teleological conception of intellectual v…Read more
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58A Virtue Epistemology: Volume I: Apt Belief and Reflective KnowledgeOxford University Press UK. 2007.A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and scepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties of s…Read more
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17Experience and the Objects of Perception (review)Review of Metaphysics 39 (1): 142-144. 1985.This study aims primarily at an account of sensory experience and perception uncommitted to objectual sense data or sense impressions. In the end it does make room for sense impressions, but only as entities somehow abstracted from phenomenological attention to sense experience. The "phenomenological standpoint" is attained by imagining "that a transparent screen has been placed at right angles about three feet from your eyes between you and all the objects before you," and by imagining further …Read more
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852A defense of the use of intuitions in philosophyIn Michael Bishop & Dominic Murphy (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Blackwell. pp. 101--112. 2009.
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3Skepticism and the internal/external divideIn John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 145--57. 1999.
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44De re belief, action explanations, and the essential indexicalIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman & Nicholas Asher (eds.), Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, Cambridge University Press. pp. 235--249. 1995.
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11Reliability andIn John Hawthorne & Tamar Szabó Gendler (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 369. 2002.
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226How to resolve the pyrrhonian problematic: A lesson from Descartes (review)Philosophical Studies 85 (2-3): 229-249. 1997.A main epistemic problematic, found already in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, presents a threefold choice on how a belief may be justified: either through infinitely regressive reasoning, or through circular reasoning, or through reasoning resting ultimately on some foundation. Aristotle himself apparently takes the foundationalist option when he argues that rational intuition is a foundational source of scientific knowledge. The five modes of Agrippa, which pertain to knowledge generally, aga…Read more
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298Can There Be a Discipline of Philosophy? And Can It Be Founded on Intuitions?Mind and Language 26 (4): 453-467. 2011.This paper takes up the critique of armchair philosophy drawn by some experimental philosophers from survey results. It also takes up a more recent development with increased methodological sophistication. The argument based on disagreement among respondents suggests a much more serious problem for armchair philosophy and puts in question the standing of our would-be discipline