•  6
    This book offers a novel analysis of the widely-used but ill-understood technique of thought experiment. The author argues that the powers and limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases
  •  131
    I—Tamar Szabó Gendler: The Third Horse: On Unendorsed Association and Human Behaviour
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 88 (1): 185-218. 2014.
    On one standard reading, Plato's works contain at least two distinct views about the structure of the human soul. According to the first, there is a crucial unity to human psychology: there is a dominant faculty that is capable of controlling attention and behaviour in a way that not only produces right action, but also ‘silences’ inclinations to the contrary—at least in idealized circumstances. According to the second, the human soul contains multiple autonomous parts, and although one of them,…Read more
  •  22
    Exceptional Persons
    In Jonathan Shear & Shaun Gallagher (eds.), Models of the Self, Imprint Academic. 1999.
  •  9
    Critical Study of Carol Rovane's The Bounds of Agency 1
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1): 229-240. 2002.
    “Like much recent work on personal identity,” Carol Rovane writes in the opening sentence of The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, “this effort takes its main cue from Locke”. The work also—as its title suggests—takes inspiration from Strawsonian neo-Kantianism. And although direct allusion to his writings is limited to a few passing references, Rovane’s essay is largely Davidsonian in spirit. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that The Bounds of Agency answers a…Read more
  •  32
    Empiricism, Rationalism and the Limits of Justification
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 641-648. 2001.
    BonJour’s intricately argued and provocative book raises a fundamental challenge for the empiricist: if we lack the capacity for direct apprehension of necessary truths, how do we know so much? How do we know about logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori subjects? How do we know about generalities, about the past and the future, about objects that are not present? How do we know about the relations that hold between premises and conclusions? If the first half of BonJour’s book is rig…Read more
  •  1
    Thought experiment is one of the most widely-used and least understood techniques in philosophy. A thought experiment is a process of reasoning carried out within the context of a well-articulated imaginary scenario in order to answer a specific question about a non-imaginary situation. The aim of my dissertation is to show that both the powers and the limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so …Read more
  •  7
    Imaginative Resistance
    In Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, David Cooper & E. (eds.), A Companion to Aesthetics: Second Edition, Blackwell. 2009.
  •  119
    Summary
    Analysis 72 (4): 759-764. 2012.
  •  32
    Review of David Schmidtz, ed. Robert Nozick (review)
    Philosophical Review 112 (1): 106-110. 2003.
    David Schmidtz’s Robert Nozick is a collection of nine specially commissioned papers on Nozick’s work by a wide range of distinguished philosophers. Nearly all of the papers are of high quality, and the volume is well conceptualized and well executed. The collection will certainly be useful to anyone with a comprehensive interest in Nozick’s corpus. In addition, many of its individual essays will be of independent interest to those concerned with particular aspects of Nozick’s work.
  •  26
    Review of Eric Olson: The Human Animal (review)
    Philosophical Review 108 (1): 112-115. 1999.
    The Human Animal is an extended defense of what its author calls the Biological Approach to personal identity: that you and I are human animals, and that the identity conditions under which we endure are those which apply to us as biological organisms. The somewhat surprising corollary of this view is that no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient for a human animal—and thus for us—to persist through time. In challenging the hegemony of Psychological Approaches to per…Read more
  •  229
    Imagination
    In Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
  •  493
    Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions
    with Karson Kovakovich
    In Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Blackwell. pp. 241-253. 2006.
    The “paradox of fictional emotions” involves a trio of claims that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible. Resolution of the paradox thus requires that we deny at least one of these plausible claims. The paradox has been formulated in various ways, but for the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on the following three claims, which we will refer to respectively as the Response Condition, the Belief Condition and the Coordination Condition
  •  31
    Robert Nozick
    Philosophical Review 112 (1): 106-110. 2003.
  •  275
    – develop self-knowledge [Socrates] – cultivate internal harmony [Plato] – foster virtue through habit [Aristotle] – cultivate and appreciate true friendship [Cicero] – recognize what is and is not in your control [Epictetus].
  •  28
    Why language is not a “direct medium”. Commentary on Ruth Garrett Millikan
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 71-72. 1998.
    Millikan contrasts her substance-based view of concepts with “descriptionism” according to which description determines what falls under a concept. Focusing on her discussion of the role of language in the acquisition of concepts, I argue that descriptions cannot be separated from perception in the ways Millikan's view requires.
  •  92
    Introduction: Perceptual experience
    In John Hawthorne & Tamar Szabó Gendler (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford University Press. pp. 1--30. 2006.
    Much contemporary discussion of perceptual experience can be traced to two observations. The first is that perception seems to put us in direct contact with the world around us: when perception is successful, we come to recognize— immediately—that certain objects have certain properties. The second is that perceptual experience may fail to provide such knowledge: when we fall prey to illusion or hallucination, the way things appear may differ radically from the way things actually are. For much …Read more
  •  205
    Empiricism, rationalism and the limits of justification (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3). 2001.
    BonJour’s intricately argued and provocative book raises a fundamental challenge for the empiricist: if we lack the capacity for direct apprehension of necessary truths, how do we know so much? How do we know about logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori subjects? How do we know about generalities, about the past and the future, about objects that are not present? How do we know about the relations that hold between premises and conclusions? If the first half of BonJour’s book is rig…Read more
  •  48
    Discussion. Continence on the cheap
    Mind 107 (428): 821-821. 1998.
  •  471
    (ed. Tamar Szabo Gendler, Susanna Siegel and Steven M. Cahn) Oxford, 2007.
  •  4241
    The Problem of Imaginative Resistance
    In John Gibson & Noël Carroll (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature, Routledge. pp. 405-418. 2016.
    The problem of imaginative resistance holds interest for aestheticians, literary theorists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and epistemologists. We present a somewhat opinionated overview of the philosophical discussion to date. We begin by introducing the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. We then review existing responses to the problem, giving special attention to recent research directions. Finally, we consider the philosophical significance that imaginative resistance has—or, at least, …Read more
  •  254
    Is Dumbledore gay?
    The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52): 94-97. 2011.
  •  811
    Conceivability and Possibility (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2002.
    The capacity to represent things to ourselves as possible plays a crucial role both in everyday thinking and in philosophical reasoning; this volume offers much-needed philosophical illumination of conceivability, possibility, and the relations between them.
  •  445
    Origin essentialism: The arguments reconsidered
    Mind 109 (434): 285-298. 2000.
    ln "Possibilities and the Arguments for Origin Essentialism" Teresa Robertson (1998) contends that the best-known arguments in favour of origin essentialism can succeed only at the cost of violating modal common sense—by denying that any variation in constitution or process of assembly is possible. Focusing on the (Kripke-style) arguments of Nathan Salmon and Graeme Forbes, Robertson shows that both founder in the face of sophisticated Ship of Theseus style considerations. While Robertson is rig…Read more
  •  1186
    On the epistemic costs of implicit bias
    Philosophical Studies 156 (1): 33-63. 2011.
  •  302
    Galileo and the indispensability of scientific thought experiment
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (3): 397-424. 1998.
    By carefully examining one of the most famous thought experiments in the history of science—that by which Galileo is said to have refuted the Aristotelian theory that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones—I attempt to show that thought experiments play a distinctive role in scientific inquiry. Reasoning about particular entities within the context of an imaginary scenario can lead to rationally justified concluusions that—given the same initial information—would not be rationally justifia…Read more
  •  785
    Alief in Action (and Reaction)
    Mind and Language 23 (5): 552--585. 2008.
    I introduce and argue for the importance of a cognitive state that I call alief. An alief is, to a reasonable approximation, an innate or habitual propensity to respond to an apparent stimulus in a particular way. Recognizing the role that alief plays in our cognitive repertoire provides a framework for understanding reactions that are governed by nonconscious or automatic mechanisms, which in turn brings into proper relief the role played by reactions that are subject to conscious regulation an…Read more
  •  169
    The elements of philosophy: readings from past and present (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2008.
    The Elements of Philosophy: Readings from Past and Present is a comprehensive collection of historical and contemporary readings across the major fields of philosophy. With depth and quality, this introductory anthology offers a selection of readings that is both extensive and expansive; the readings span twenty-five centuries. They are organized topically into five parts: Religion and Belief, Moral and Political Philosophy, Metaphysics and Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind and Language, and Life…Read more