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25The Real Distinction Between Mind and BodyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 20 (sup1): 149-201. 1990.….it [is] wholly irrational to regard as doubtful matters that are perceived clearly and distinctly by the understanding in its purity, on account of mere prejudices of the senses and hypotheses in which there is an element of the unknown.Descartes, Geometrical Exposition of the MeditationsSubstance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a …Read more
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183. Inclusion in Metaphysics and SemanticsIn Aboutness, Princeton University Press. pp. 45-53. 2014.
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17Superproportionality and Mind-Body RelationsTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 16 (1): 65-75. 2001.Mental causes are threatened from two directions: from below, since they would appear to be screened off by lower-order, e.g., neural states; and from within, since they would also appear to be screened off by intrinsic, e.g., syntactical states. A principle needed to parry the first threat -causes should be proportional to their effects- appears to leave us open to the second; for why should unneeded extrinsic detail be any less offensive to proportionality than excess microstructure? I say tha…Read more
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17Almog on Descartes's Mind and BodyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (3): 709-716. 2007.
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14Prime Causation1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2): 459-467. 2007.No one doubts that mental states can be wide. Why should this seem to prevent them from causing behavior? Tim points to an "internalist line of thought"
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14IntrinsicnessIn Robert M. Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties, De Gruyter. pp. 41-68. 2014.
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8Permissive UpdatesIn Federico L. G. Faroldi & Frederik Van De Putte (eds.), Kit Fine on Truthmakers, Relevance, and Non-classical Logic, Springer Verlag. pp. 615-662. 2023.David Lewis asked in “A problem about permission” about the effects on context, specifically on the “sphere of permissibility,” of allowing behavior that had previously been forbidden. The framework of truthmaker semantics sheds useful light on this problem. Update procedures are definable in the truthmaker framework that capture more than Lewis was able to just with worlds. Connections are drawn with epistemic modals, belief revision and the semantics of exceptives. We consider how a truthmaker…Read more
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2ThingsDissertation, University of California, Berkeley. 1986.Essentialists hold that certain of a thing's properties are specially fundamental, antiessentialists that all of a thing's properties are on a par. As a result, essentialists can explain how, e.g., a statue and its clay are different, but not how they are the same, whereas antiessentialists can explain how they're the same but not how they're different. Ordinarily, though, we reckon them in one sense the same and in another different. ;To accomodate the ordinary view, essentialism and antiessent…Read more
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2Illusions of possibilityIn Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Josep Macià (eds.), Two-Dimensional Semantics, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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. Research Problems and MethodsIn Robert Barnard & Neil Manson (eds.), Continuum Companion to Metaphysics, Continuum Publishing. 2012.
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