Princeton University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1995
London, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Perception
  •  687
    Producing language that other people will be able to understand involves not just having a picture in your mind of the scenario…You have to deploy a shared linguistic system, according to established rules, using lexemes of known meaning, to present that picture to others in a way that will work for them. You have to consider whether there are other ways of viewing the situation at hand. You have to examine the wording you have chosen to see if it has ambiguities or unclarities. You have to put …Read more
  •  4220
    Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study of perception, taking as its starting point a puzzle in Empedocles' theory of vision: if perception is a mode of material assimilation, how can we perceive colors at a distance? Kalderon argues that the theory of perception offered by Aristotle in answer to the puzzle is both attractive and defensible
  •  143
    CHANGE SLIDE Go through outline of talk CHANGE SLIDE It is my sincerest hope that if there is one thing that people take away from Moral Fictionalism, it is the recognition that standard noncognitivism involves a syndrome of three, logically distinct claims. Standard noncognitivists claim that moral judgment is not belief or any other cognitive attitude but is, rather, a noncognitive attitude more akin to desire; that this noncognitive attitude is expressed by our public moral utterances; and, h…Read more
  •  738
    Unless you are a Frege scholar, or a philosopher of mathematics, if you are familiar at all with Frege’s work, you are most likely familiar with his groundbreaking work in the philosophy of language. You might know that Frege was a mathematician who sought to establish the covertly logical subject matter of arithmetic, a project whose demands drove Frege to his logical investigations and reflections on language. But most likely the connection between Frege’s mathematical research and his philoso…Read more
  •  118
    What numbers could be (and, hence, necessarily are)
    Philosophia Mathematica 4 (3): 238-255. 1996.
    This essay explores the commitments of modal structuralism. The precise nature of the modal-structuralist analysis obscures an unclarity of its import. As usually presented, modal structuralism is a form of anti-platonism. I defend an interpretation of modal structuralism that, far from being a form of anti-platonism, is itself a platonist analysis: The metaphysically significant distinction between (i) primitive modality and (ii) the natural numbers (objectually understood) is genuine, but the …Read more
  •  55
    Realistic rationalism (review)
    Philosophical Review 109 (3): 456-459. 2000.
    Philosophy of mathematics is in an alienated state. While regarded by the profession as a serious and legitimate subdiscipline, a passing knowledge of its subject matter is considered something of a luxury—or at least not required of a conscientious philosopher the way a passing knowledge of logic is. Philosophy of mathematics is thus regarded with a benign neglect: best left to the experts, whose opinions should be deferred to, but mostly irrelevant to the central concerns of the working philos…Read more
  •  799
    This is the third and final section of a paper, "Oxford Realism", co-written with Charles Travis. A concern for realism motivates a fundamental strand of Oxford reflection on perception. Begin with the realist conception of knowledge. The question then will be: What must perception be like if we can know something about an object without the mind by seeing it? What must perception be if it can, on occasion, afford us with proof concerning a subject matter independent of the mind?
  •  131
    Moral Fictionalism
    Clarendon Press. 2005.
    Mark Eli Kalderon argues that morality is a fiction by means of which our emotional attitudes are conveyed. This is an improvement on the standard noncognitivist view, which denies that moral judgement is belief but claims instead that it is the expression of an emotional attitude. Noncognitivists tend to deny that moral sentences even purport to represent moral reality, and so they have developed non-standard semantics for moral discourse. Kalderon's fictionalism shows that noncognitivism can m…Read more
  •  441
    The Frege Geach problem was rst raised by ? (1939: 33•34) and independently by ? (1958, 1960, 1965) and Searle (1962, 1969) and was originally directed at expressivist proposals such as Ayer's (1946: 108) emotivism: It is worth mentioning that ethical terms do not serve only to express feeling. They are calculated also to arouse feeling, and so to stimulate action. . . . In fact we may de ne the meaning of the various ethical words in terms both of the di erent feelings they are ordinarily taken…Read more
  •  1376
    Very often, objects in the scene before us are somehow perceived to be constant or uniform or unchanging in color, shape, size, or position, even while their appearance with respect to these features somehow changes. This is a familiar and pervasive fact about perception, even if it is notoriously difficult to describe accurately let alone adequately account for. These difficulties are not unrelated—how we are inclined to describ the phenomenology of perceptual constancy will affect how we are i…Read more
  •  557
    The presence of the fiery substance illuminates the transparent medium. White (leukon) corresponds to the presence of this determinant of what is actually transparent. Conversely, black (melaton) corresponds to its absence. The absence of the fiery substance darkens the transparent medium. White and black are thus associated with a fundamental condition on the visibility of remote external particulars. No doubt in part because of this Aristotle attempts to explain the other hues in terms of the …Read more
  •  754
    The Trouble with Terminology
    Philosophical Books 49 (1): 33-41. 2008.
    Producing language that other people will be able to understand involves not just having a picture in your mind of the scenario…You have to deploy a shared linguistic system, according to established rules, using lexemes of known meaning, to present that picture to others in a way that will work for them. You have to consider whether there are other ways of viewing the situation at hand. You have to examine the wording you have chosen to see if it has ambiguities or unclarities. You have to put …Read more
  •  480
    Priscian on Perception
    Phronesis: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy 62 (4): 443-467. 2017.
    An aporia posed by Theophrastus prompts Priscian to describe the process by which perception formally assimilates to its object as a progressive perfection. I present an interpretation of Priscian’s account of perception’s progressive perfection. And I consider a dilemma for the general class of accounts to which Priscian’s belongs based on related problems raised by Plotinus and Aquinas.
  • L a T e X and subversion
    Practex Journal (3). 2007.
  •  131
    Epiphenomenalism and content
    Philosophical Studies 52 (1): 71-90. 1987.
    Peer Reviewed.
  • Subversion and textmate: Making collaboration easier for L a T e X users
    with Charilaos Skiadas and Thomas Kjosmoen
    Practex Journal (3). 2007.
  •  20
    Realistic Rationalism (review)
    Philosophical Review 109 (3): 456. 2000.
  •  1071
    Aristotle on transparency
    In Thomas Crowther & Clare Mac Cumhaill (eds.), Perceptual Ephemera, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    A puzzle about the presentation of objects located at a distance is seen to animate Aristotle's account of transparency in De Anima and De Sensu.
  •  1
    Oxford Realism
    In Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 489--517. 2013.
  •  625
    Sympathy in Perception
    Cambridge University Press. 2017.
    This is a book about the metaphysics of perception and discusses touch, audition, and vision. Though primarily concerned with the nature of perception, it draws heavily from the history of philosophy of perception, and connects the concerns of analytical and continental philosophers.
  • Moral Fictionalism
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 68 (2): 412-413. 2006.
  •  912
    Jimmy expresses sympathy for Scanlon’s contractualism but wonders whether it might be better developed in the context of a Humean expressivism. Jimmy presses this point, in part, by observing that much of what Scanlon wants to say about moral and normative discourse, such as their logical discipline and apparent truth-aptitude, can be accommodated by the expressivist. If all that Scanlon wants to say about moral and normative discourse can be accommodated by the expressivist then what content ca…Read more
  •  993
    Color Illusion
    Noûs 45 (4): 751-775. 2011.
    As standardly conceived, an illusion is an experience of an object o appearing F where o is not in fact F. Paradigm examples of color illusion, however, do not fit this pattern. A diagnosis of this uncovers different sense of appearance talk that is the basis of a dilemma for the standard conception. The dilemma is only a challenge. But if the challenge cannot be met, then any conception of experience, such as representationalism, that is committed to the standard conception is false. Perhaps su…Read more
  •  758
    The Multiply Qualitative
    Mind 120 (478): 239-262. 2011.
    Shoemaker argues that one could not hold both that the qualitative character of colour experience is inherited from the qualitative character of the experienced colour and that there are faultless forms of variation in colour perception. In this paper, I explain what is meant by inheritance and discuss in detail the problematic cases of perceptual variation. In so doing I argue that these claims are in fact consistent, and that the appearance to the contrary is due to an optional and controversi…Read more
  •  1039
    In his 1904 letter to G.F. Stout, Cook Wilson distinguishes objective and sub- jective conceptions of appearance, and provides a diagnosis for the modern acceptance of the subjective conception in terms of a confused misdescrip- tion of the objective appearances that perceptual experience affords. More- over, Cook Wilson links subjective appearances with idealism, the suggestion being that perceptual appearances must be objective if they are to afford us with something akin to proof of a world w…Read more
  •  645
    Review of John Searle's Seeing Things as They Are (review)
    The Times Literary Supplement (5866). 2015.