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35In this presentation, I argue for a conception of rational capacities that makes us epistemic agents without essential reference or appeal to self-consciousness/self-knowledge, contrary to McDowell, Moran, and others. At the same time, his conception of rational capacities as powers at the personal level saves our epistemic agency against worries that Hilary Kornblith has put forward
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Teil 1. Kriterien des primär Seienden. Substance and identity / Jonathan Lowe. Substanz und Unabhängigkeit / Benjamin Schnieder. Substrate, Substanzen und Individualiẗat (review)In Käthe Trettin (ed.), Substanz: Neue Überlegungen Zu Einer Klassischen Kategorie des Seienden, Vittorio Klostermann. 2005.
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11According to a classical causal account of perception, to perceive that object x is F is to fulfill the following conditions: (i) one has an experience as of x's being F, (ii) x is F, and (iii) one's experience of x's being F depends causally on x's being F. This is the core of Grice's causal theory of perception, and it is initially quite plausible (Grice 1961).
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166Intuitions, concepts, and imaginationPhilosophical Psychology 23 (4): 529-546. 2010.Recently, a new movement of philosophers, called 'experimental philosophy', has suggested that the philosophers' favored armchair is in flames. In order to assess some of their claims, it is helpful to provide a theoretical background against which we can discuss whether certain facts are, or could be, evidence for or against a certain view about how philosophical intuitions work and how good they are. In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with providing such a theoretical background, and I …Read more
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125Causal powers, realization, and mental causationErkenntnis 67 (2). 2007.Sydney Shoemaker has attempted to save mental causation by a new account of realization. As Brian McLaughlin argues convincingly, the account has to face two major problems. First, realization does not guarantee entailment. So even if mental properties are realized by physical properties, they need not be entailed by them. This is the first, rather general metaphysical problem. A second problem, which relates more directly to mental causation is that Shoemaker must appeal to some kind of proport…Read more
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33Recently, some philosophers have claimed that consciousness has an important epistemological role to play in the introspective self-ascription of one’s own mental states. This is the thesis of the epistemological role of consciousness for introspective self-knowledge. I will criticize BonJour’s account of the role of consciousness for introspection. He does not provide any reason for believing that conscious states are epistemically better off than non-conscious states. Then I will sketch a repr…Read more
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24Plato’s Meno problem is the problem of why knowledge is better than true belief which is not knowledge. The paper studies the account of this surplus value of knowledge that recent reliabilist virtue epistemologists like John Greco and Ernest Sosa have proposed: knowledge is true belief from epistemic virtue. I reconstruct the master argument which subsumes the epistemic case under the general case of success from virtue. Five accounts of virtue are presented and discussed critically. The result…Read more
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14The presentation defends a fullblooded, 'thick' virtue-theoretic account of epistemic normativity. If we think of beliefs as under the control of rational agents, by means of their rational capacities, the norm of excellence applies to doxastic action as well as any other rational action. An argument is presented to the effect that the knowledge norm is the right norm of belief.
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61An alternative to endurantism and perdurantism: Doing without occupantsIn Benedikt Schick, Edmund Runggaldier & Ludger Honnefelder (eds.), Unity and Time in Metaphysics, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 134. 2009.
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88Three kinds of reliabilismPhilosophical Explorations 16 (1). 2013.I distinguish between three kinds of reliabilism for epistemic justification, namely, pure reliabilism, evidential reliabilism, and reasons reliabilism, and I argue for reasons reliabilism. Pure reliabilism and evidential reliabilism are plagued, most importantly, by the generality problem, and they cannot deal adequately with defeater phenomena. One can avoid these problems only by jettisoning the idea of process reliability. The truth connection ? which is essential for any kind of reliabilism…Read more
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Consciousness Revisited. Materialism Without Phenomenal Concepts (review)Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 65 (1). 2011.
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121Truthmaking, recombination, and facts ontologyPhilosophical Studies 128 (2): 409-440. 2006.The idea of truthmakers is important for doing serious metaphysics, since a truthmaker principle can give us important guidance in finding out what we would like to include into our ontology. Recently, David Lewis has argued against Armstrong’s argument that a plausible truthmaker principle requires us to accept facts. I would like to take a close look at the argument. I will argue in detail that the Humean principle of recombination on which Lewis relies is not plausible (independently of the i…Read more
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96Non‐conceptual knowledgePhilosophical Issues 24 (1): 184-208. 2014.The paper is an investigation into the prospects of an epistemology of non-conceptual knowledge. According to the orthodox view, knowledge requires concepts and belief. I present several arguments to the effect that there is non-conceptual, non-doxastic knowledge, the obvious candidate for such knowledge being non-conceptual perception. Non-conceptual perception seems to be allowed for by cognitive scientists and it exhibits the central role features of knowledge—it plays the knowledge role: it …Read more
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77Gettier For JustificationEpisteme 11 (3): 305-318. 2014.I will present a problem for any externalist evidentialism that allows for accidental possession of evidence. There are Gettier cases for justification. I will describe two such cases – cases involving veridical hallucination. An analysis of the cases is given, along the lines of virtue epistemology . The cases show that certain externalist evidentialist accounts of justification do not provide sufficient conditions. The reason lies in the fact that one can be luckily in possession of evidence, …Read more
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85Why Epistemic Contextualism Does Not Provide an Adequate Account of Knowledge: Comments on BarkeErkenntnis 61 (2-3): 375-382. 2004.According to Antonia Barkes version of contextualism, epistemic contextualism, a context is defined by a method and its associated assumptions. The subject has to make the assumption that the method is adequate or reliable and that good working conditions hold in order to arrive at knowledge by employing the method. I will criticize Barkes claim that epistemic contextualism can provide a more satisfactory explanation or motivation for context shifts than conversational contextualism (in particul…Read more
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83Can there be a state which is both a belief and a desire? More exactly, a state which is a belief that p and a desire that q, where p and q may be the same proposition or a different one? Such a state would be a ‘besire’. So a first question is the general question whether besires are possible. Normative attitudes would be good candidates for besires. For example, if Sandra has the normative attitude that it would be best for her to leave the country, this seems to be a propositional state of he…Read more
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42Temporally localised facts and the problem of intrinsic changeRatio 18 (1). 2005.Hugh Mellor has proposed what appears to be a new solution to the problem of intrinsic change (Mellor 1998). Assuming endurantism and a B‐theoretic, nonpresentist view of time, facts are supposed to have only enduring things and atemporal properties (or relations) as constituents, but no times. The having of properties and relations is not relativised to times. Instead, the whole of a fact is conceived of as temporally localised. It will be argued that this interesting and novel proposal does no…Read more
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60Epistemic Means and Ends: In Defense of Some Sartwellian InsightsSynthese 146 (3): 357-369. 2005.The question of what means-and-ends structure our epistemic endeavors have is an important issue in recent epistemology, and is fundamental for understanding epistemic matters in principle. Crispin Sartwell has proposed arguments for the view that knowledge is our only ultimate goal, and justification is no part of it. An important argument is his instrumentality argument which is concerned with the conditions under which something could belong to our ultimate epistemic goal. Recently, this argu…Read more
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41The reference of de re representationsGrazer Philosophische Studien 62 (1): 83-101. 2001.Full understanding ofrepresentation requires both an accountofrepresentational content and of reference. Fred Dretske has proposed a powerful theory of representational content, the teleological theory of indicator functions. And he has indicated that he thinks an informational account of reference is basically correct. According to this account, reference is determined by a certain informational relation, the relation of carrying primary information about an object. However, a closer examinatio…Read more