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6Thought Experiment: On the Powers and Limits of Imaginary CasesRoutledge. 2000.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
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131I—Tamar Szabó Gendler: The Third Horse: On Unendorsed Association and Human BehaviourAristotelian 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
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32Empiricism, Rationalism and the Limits of JustificationPhilosophy 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
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1Imaginary Exceptions: On the Powers and Limits of Thought ExperimentDissertation, Harvard University. 1996.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
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22Exceptional PersonsIn Jonathan Shear & Shaun Gallagher (eds.), Models of the Self, Imprint Academic. 1999.
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9Critical Study of Carol Rovane's The Bounds of Agency 1Philosophy 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
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7Imaginative ResistanceIn Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, David Cooper & E. (eds.), A Companion to Aesthetics: Second Edition, Blackwell. 2009.
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32Review 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.
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26Review 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
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229ImaginationIn Peter Adamson (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
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493Genuine Rational Fictional EmotionsIn 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
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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].
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28Why language is not a “direct medium”. Commentary on Ruth Garrett MillikanBehavioral 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.
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92Introduction: Perceptual experienceIn 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
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205Empiricism, 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
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471Table of contents from the elements of philosophy: Readings from past and presentOxford University Press. 2008.(ed. Tamar Szabo Gendler, Susanna Siegel and Steven M. Cahn) Oxford, 2007.
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4241The Problem of Imaginative ResistanceIn 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
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270On the relation between pretense and beliefIn Matthew Kieran & Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), Imagination Philosophy and the Arts, Routledge. pp. 125--141. 2003.By the age of two, children are able to engage in highly elaborate games of symbolic pretense, in which objects and actions in the actual world are taken to stand for objects and actions in a realm of make-believe. These games of pretense are marked by the presence of two central features, which I will call quarantining and mirroring (see also Leslie 1987; Perner 1991). Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the pretense-episode are taken to have effects only within that prete…Read more
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89Critical Study of Carol Rovane’s The Bounds of Agency (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (1). 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
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78On the possibility of feminist epistemologyMetaphilosophy 27 (1-2): 104-117. 1996.In this article, I propose one way of understanding the expression “feminist epistemology.” I begin from the premise that improper philosophical attention has been paid to the implications of what I call The Fact of Preconditions for Agency: that moral and rational agents become such only through a long, deliberate, and intensive process of intervention and teaching, a process that requires commitments of time, effort and emotion on the part of other agents. I contend that this is a sufficiently…Read more
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398Personal identity and thought-experimentsPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (206): 34-54. 2002.Through careful analysis of a specific example, Parfit’s ‘fission argument’ for the unimportance of personal identity, I argue that our judgements concerning imaginary scenarios are likely to be unreliable when the scenarios involve disruptions of certain contingent correlations. Parfit’s argument depends on our hypothesizing away a number of facts which play a central role in our understanding and employment of the very concept under investigation; as a result, it fails to establish what Parfit clai…Read more
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202Imaginative contagionMetaphilosophy 37 (2): 183-203. 2006.The aim of this article is to expand the diet of examples considered in philosophical discussions of imagination and pretense, and to offer some preliminary observations about what we might learn about the nature of imagination as a result. The article presents a number of cases involving imaginative contagion: cases where merely imagining or pretending that P has effects that we would expect only perceiving or believing that P to have. Examples are offered that involve visual imagery, motor ima…Read more
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494Better Than Mere Knowledge? The Function of Sensory AwarenessIn John Hawthorne & Tamar Gendler (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford University Press. pp. 260--290. 2006.
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3Oxford Studies in Epistemology: Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2007.Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publicaton which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe and Australasia, it will publish exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: *traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, t…Read more
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225Exceptional persons: On the limits of imaginary casesJournal of Consciousness Studies 5 (5-6): 592-610. 1998.It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him.
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Epistemology |
Aesthetics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |