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77On Whether the Atemporal Conception of the World Is Also AmodalAnalytic Philosophy 56 (2): 142-157. 2015.
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77Causation, Free Will, and NaturalismIn Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid (eds.), Scientific metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 208--235. 2013.This chapter addresses the worry that the existence of causal antecedents to your choices means that you are causally compelled to act as you do. It begins with the folk notion of cause, leads the reader through recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts, and argues that those developments undermine the threat from causal antecedents. The discussion is then used as a model for a kind of naturalistic metaphysics that takes its lead from science, letting everyday concep…Read more
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72Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices, and the Impossibility of Laplacean IntelligencesThe Monist 102 (4): 478-498. 2019.In a famous passage drawing implications from determinism, Laplace introduced the image an intelligence who knew the positions and momenta of all of the particles of which the universe is composed, and asserted that in a deterministic universe such an intelligence would be able to predict everything that happens over its entire history. It is not, however, difficult to establish the physical possibility of a counterpredictive device, i.e., a device designed to act counter to any revealed predict…Read more
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68Descartes begins his discussion in the Meditations with the question ‘what am I?’ and concludes, famously, that he is a non-material substance. His reasoning turns on the thesis that nothing can be true of his..
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65What Chances Could Not BeBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1): 79-91. 1996.The chance of a physical event is the objective, single-case probability that it will occur. In probabilistic physical theories like quantum mechanics, the chances of physical events play the formal role that the values of physical quantities play in classical physics, and there is a temptation to regard them on the model of the latter as describing intrinsic properties of the systems to which they are assigned. I argue that this understanding of chances in quantum mechanics, despite being a par…Read more
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63Responses to Symposiasts (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (3): 780-787. 2011.The riddle posed by the double nature of the ego certainly lies beyond [the limits of science]. On the one hand, I am a real individual man, born by a mother anddestined to carrying out real and psychical acts (far too many, I may think, if boarding a subway during an hour). On the other hand, I am "vision" open toreason, a self-penetrating light, immanent sense-giving consciousness, or how ever you may call it, and as such unique. (Weyl, Address, 3)
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56We review and discuss the recent monograph by David Wallace on Everettian Quantum Mechanics. This book is a high point of two decades of work on Everett in both physics and philosophy. It is also a beautiful and welcome exemplar of a modern way of doing metaphysics. We discuss certain aspects more critically, and take the opportunity to sketch an alternative pragmatist approach to probability in Everett, to be fully developed elsewhere.
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53Rememberances, Mementos, and Time-CapsulesRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 50 317-. 2002.I want to consider some features of the position put forward by Julian Barbour in The End of Time that seem to me of particular philosophical interest. At the level of generality at which I'll be concerned with it, the view is relatively easy to describe. It can be arrived at by thinking of time as decomposing in some natural way linearly ordered atomic parts, ‘moments’, and combining an observation about the internal structure of moments with an epistemological doctrine about our access to the …Read more
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53A philosopher of science looks at idealization in political theorySocial Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2): 11-31. 2016.:Rawls ignited a debate in political theory when he introduced a division between the ideal and nonideal parts of a theory of justice. In the ideal part of the theory, one presents a positive conception of justice in a setting that assumes perfect compliance with the rules of justice. In the nonideal part, one addresses the question of what happens under departures from compliance. Critics of Rawls have attacked his focus on ideal theory as a form of utopianism, and have argued that political th…Read more
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45Rethinking Time and Determinism: What Happens to Determinism When You Take Relativity SeriouslyIn Remy Lestienne & Paul A. Harris (eds.), Time and Science, Volume 1: The Metaphysics of Time and Its Evolution, World Scientific Publishing. pp. 147-172. 2023.
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36Me, againIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, Mit Press. 2010.Thought about the self raises some very special problems. Some of these concern indexical reference quite generally, but there is one having to do with identity over time that seems to be unique to the self. I use an historical exchange between Anscombe and Descartes to bring out the problem, and propose a resolution that casts light both on why self-directed thought presents a unique epistemic predicament and where Descartes’ cogito may have gone wrong.
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33Freedom, Compulsion, and CausationPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 13. 2007.The intuitive notion of cause carries with it the idea of compulsion. When we learn that the dynamical laws are deterministic, we give this a causal reading and imagine our actions compelled to occur by conditions laid down at the beginning of the universe. Hume famously argued that this idea of compulsion is borrowed from experience and illegitimately projected onto regularities in the world. Exploiting the interventionist analysis of causal relations, together with an insight about the degener…Read more
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17Time: a very short introductionOxford University Press. 2021.What is time? What does it mean for time to pass? Is it possible to travel in time? What is the difference between the past and future? Until the work of Newton, these questions were purely topics of philosophical speculation. Since then we've learned a great deal about time, and its study has moved from a subject of philosophical reflection to instead became part of the subject matter of physics. This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the current physical understanding of the direct…Read more
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13The Situated SelfOxford University Press USA. 2006.J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world?
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9Symmetry as a guide to superfluous theoretical structureIn Katherine Brading & Elena Castellani (eds.), Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections, Cambridge University Press. pp. 371--92. 2003.
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6Essays on SymmetryRoutledge. 2001.Drawing from physics and philosophical debates, Ismael combines a set of essays on the time worn debate of symmetry from both fields
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6How to Be HumeanIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.This chapter argues that Humean analyses do not provide content‐preserving reductions and non‐trivial accounts of the reference. It introduces a distinction between structure in the realm of Being and structure in the representations of Being. The chapter argues that there are good reasons not to expect content‐preserving reductions of the modal to the non‐modal at the level of content, or useful mappings of content‐level structures into structures at the level of Being. In the rest of the chapt…Read more
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5Temporal ExperienceIn Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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2Passage, Flow, and the Logic of Temporal PerspectivesIn Philippe Huneman & Christophe Bouton (eds.), Time of Nature and the Nature of Time: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences, Springer. 2017.
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1What Entanglement Might Be Telling Us: Space, Quantum Mechanics, and Bohm's Fish TankIn David Glick, George Darby & Marmodoro Anna (eds.), The Foundation of Reality: Fundamentality, Space, and Time, Oxford University Press. pp. 139-153. 2020.
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On chanceIn Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2020.
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10 Me, AgainIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, Mit Press. pp. 209. 2010.
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Why (Study) the Humanities?: The View from ScienceIn Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Physical Science |