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298Freedom and Determinism (edited book)Bradford. 2004.This collection of contemporary essays by prominent contemporary thinkers on the topics of determinism and free agency concentrates primarily on two areas: the compatibility problem and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. There are also essays on the related fields of determinism and action theory. The book is unique in that it contains up-to-date summaries of the life-work of five influential philosophers: John Earman, Ted Honderich, Keith Lehrer, Robert Kane, and Peter van Inwagen. There …Read more
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134Interventionism, control variables and causation in the qualitative worldPhilosophical Issues 18 (1): 426-445. 2008.No Abstract
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73Causation in PsychologyHarvard University Press. 2020."A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. "Can you help me?" "What is the worst thing you've ever done?" "Who in the world do you love most?" People pour their hearts out in response. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship? Philosopher J…Read more
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148Control variables and mental causationProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 110 (1pt1): 15-30. 2010.I introduce the notion of a ‘control variable’ which gives us a way of seeing how mental causation could be an unproblematic case of causation in general, rather than being some sui generis form of causation. Psychological variables may be the control variables for a system for which there are no physical control variables, even in a deterministic physical world. That explains how there can be psychological causation without physical causation, even in a deterministic physical world.
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12The Meanings of Work in John LockeIn Mikkel Thorup, Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, Christian Christiansen & Jakob Bek-Thomsen (eds.), History of Economic Rationalities: Economic Reasoning as Knowledge and Practice Authority, Springer Verlag. 2017.The early modern writings of John Locke are important not for their originality or coherence but for what they offer in understanding the ideological grounds of capitalist economics. Locke offers a justification of inequality in terms of the apparently meritocratic idea of equality – not the equality between people but rather the equivalence between the work of each isolated individual and their reward. This justification of inequality in terms of the work of individuals is anchored in a quite s…Read more
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229Compatibilist alternativesCanadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 387-406. 2005._If you were free in doing something and morally responsible for it, you could have done otherwise. That_ _has seemed a pretty firm proposition among the old, new, clear, unclear and other propositions in the_ _philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism. If you were free in what you did, there was an_ _alternative. It is also at least natural to think that if determinism is true, you can never do otherwise than_ _you do. G. E. Moore, that Cambridge reasoner in whose shadow Wittgenstein …Read more
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14Editorial introductionBusiness Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility 16 (3): 196-202. 2007.This special issue presents the results of a three‐day conference that was held between 27 and 29 October 2005 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. The papers in this issue approach the work of Emmanuel Levinas and respond to him in different ways. Some introduce his work, some apply it in various contexts, some propose to extend it, while others question it. The issue also includes, in English for the first time, a translation of ‘Sociality and Mone…Read more
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101Time and Identity (edited book)Bradford. 2010.The concepts of time and identity seem at once unproblematic and frustratingly difficult. Time is an intricate part of our experience -- it would seem that the passage of time is a prerequisite for having any experience at all -- and yet recalcitrant questions about time remain. Is time real? Does time flow? Do past and future moments exist? Philosophers face similarly stubborn questions about identity, particularly about the persistence of identical entities through change. Indeed, questions ab…Read more
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109Causation and Explanation (edited book)Bradford. 2007.This collection of original essays on the topics of causation and explanation offers readers a state-of-the-art view of current work in these areas. The book is notable for its interdisciplinary character, and the essays, by distinguished authors and important rising scholars, will be of interest to a wide readership, including philosophers, computer scientists, and economists. Students and scholars alike will find the book valuable for its wide-ranging treatment of two difficult philosophical t…Read more
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19Ethics in a time of crisis: editorial introduction to special focusBusiness Ethics: A European Review 22 (1): 64-67. 2012.
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25Editorial introduction: Derrida, business, ethicsBusiness Ethics 19 (3): 235-237. 2010.This special issue contains papers first presented at a conference that was held 14–16 May 2008 at the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy at the University of Leicester. Each of the papers takes up ideas from the works of Jacques Derrida and seeks to apply these to questions of business, ethics and business ethics. The papers take up quite different parts of Derrida's works, from his work on the animal, narrative and story, the violence of codification and the limits of responsibility t…Read more
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36The history of ideas and contemporary genocide studies conjointly suggests a meaningful secular conception of evil. I will show how the history of ideas supplies us with a cumulative pattern, or an eventual gestalt, of the sought-for conception of universal secular evil. This gestalt is a result of my examination of the history of ideas. The historical analysis of evil firmly grounds my research in the tradition of philosophical inquiry, where I shift the focus from the problem of evil, which is…Read more
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2The Role of Demonstratives in Action-ExplanationIn Johannes Roessler & Naomi Eilan (eds.), Agency and Self-Awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Clarendon Press. 2003.
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32Sociality and money1Business Ethics 16 (3): 203-207. 2007.This is a translation of ‘Socialité et argent’, a text by Emmanuel Levinas originally published in 1987. Levinas describes the emergence of money out of interhuman relations of exchange and the social relations – sociality – that result. While elsewhere he has presented sociality as ‘nonindifference to alterity’ it appears here as ‘proximity of the stranger’ and points to the tension between an economic system based on money and the basic human disposition to respond to the face of the other per…Read more
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3On the Nature of Genocidal IntentLexington Books. 2012.This book is a logical analysis of genocidal intent, which analyzes the necessary theoretical framework needed to understand its complex structure
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272Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science (edited book)MIT Press. 2011.Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification.
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49Sortals and the binding problemIn Fraser MacBride (ed.), Identity and Modality, Oxford University Press. pp. 203--18. 2006.
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104Ordinary Thinking about TimeIn Friedrich Stadler & Michael Stöltzner (eds.), Time and History: Proceedings of the 28. International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg Am Wechsel, Austria 2005, De Gruyter. pp. 1-12. 2006.I will describe two non-standard ways of thinking about time. The first is ubiquitous in animal cognition. I will call it ‘phase time’. Suppose for example you consider a hibernating animal. This animal might have representation of the various seasons of the year, and modulate its actions dependent on the season. But it need have no distinction between the winter of one year and the winter of another; it thinks of time only in terms of repeatable phases.
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30Compatibilist AlternativesCanadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (3): 387-406. 2005.This paper is a defense of traditional compatibilism. Traditional compatibilism is, roughly, the view that free will is essential to moral responsibility, free will requires alternative possibilities of action, or alternatives for short, and moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Traditional compatibilism is a version of the traditional theory of free will. According to the traditional theory, a person S performed an action a freely only if S could have done otherwise, that is, onl…Read more
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11Numerical abstractness and elementary arithmeticBehavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (3-4). 2009.Like number representation, basic arithmetic seems to be a natural candidate for abstract instantiation in the brain. To investigate this, researchers have examined effects of numeral format on elementary arithmetic (e.g., 4+5 vs. four+five). Different numeral formats often recruit distinct processes for arithmetic, reinforcing the conclusion that number processing is not necessarily abstracted away from numeral format
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79Deciding on ViolencePhilosophy of Management 2 (1): 23-32. 2002.If we were to believe the popular press, it would seem that violence at work is an increasingly pressing concern for employees, employers and legislative bodies. In this paper we offer a set of philosophical reflections on violence, in order to clarify and destabilise some of the assumptions which run through many discussions of, and practical interventions into, violence in the workplace. Rather than focusing on violence ‘as such’, we consider various ways in which actions have been, and could …Read more
Statesboro, Georgia, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mathematics |