•  571
    Lorsque je me réveille le matin, je trouve ma femme à côté de moi et notre chien lové entre nous. Elle est calme et il est petit. Le faible bruit de leur respiration m’enveloppe tandis que je reprends progressivement conscience. Je repousse la couverture ; la fraîcheur de l’air me frappe. Je vais dans la cuisine et tourne le robinet pour me remplir un verre d’eau. Je suis l’aiguille des secondes sur...
  •  225
    Two Defenses of Common-Sense Ontology
    Dialectica 65 (2): 177-204. 2011.
    In a series of publications, Eli Hirsch has presented a sustained defense of common-sense ontology. Hirsch's argument relies crucially on a meta-ontological position sometimes known as ‘superficialism’. Hirsch's argument from superficialism to common-sense ontology is typically resisted on the grounds that superficialism is implausible. In this paper, I present an alternative argument for common-sense ontology, one that relies on (what I argue is) a much more plausible meta-ontological position,…Read more
  •  284
    Phenomenal Intentionality (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    Phenomenal intentionality is supposed to be a kind of directedness of the mind onto the world that is grounded in the conscious feel of mental life. This book of new essays explores a number of issues raised by the notion of phenomenal intentionality
  •  127
    Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers an answer. His aim is a comprehensive theory of the features that all and only conscious mental events have. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental events differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they may represent, they always also represent themselves, and do so in a very spec…Read more
  •  399
    Precis of The Varieties of Consciousness
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 7 (2): 240-246. 2016.
  •  14
    Introduction: Consciousness and Self-Representation
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.
    The symposium before us examines aspects of the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and self-representation—in particular, the alleged capacity of some mental state to represent themselves. The hypothesis under consideration is that all and only conscious states are self-representational in this way. The symposium contains two papers favoring the hypothesis and two opposing it. Each paper is accompanied by a critical commentary.
  •  61
    Review of D. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3): 515-519. 2008.
  •  1491
    Cognitivism about emotion and the alleged hyperopacity of emotional content
    Philosophical Studies 173 (2): 315-320. 2016.
    According to cognitivism about emotion, emotions are reducible to some non-emotional states. In one version, they are reducible entirely to cognitive states, such as beliefs or judgments; in another, they are reducible to combinations of cognitive and conative states, such as desire or intention. Cognitivism is plausibly regarded as the orthodoxy in the philosophy of emotion since the 1980s. In a recent paper, however, Montague develops a powerful argument against cognitivism. Here I argue that …Read more
  •  80
  •  260
    Phenomenal Intentionality Meets the Extended Mind
    with Terence Horgan
    The Monist 91 (2): 347-373. 2008.
    We argue that the letter of the Extended Mind hypothesis can be accommodated by a strongly internalist, broadly Cartesian conception of mind. The argument turns centrally on an unusual but highly plausible view on the mark of the mental.
  •  1724
    Brentano's Dual‐Framing Theory of Consciousness
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (1): 79-98. 2018.
    Brentano's theory of consciousness has garnered a surprising amount of attention in recent philosophy of mind. Here I argue for a novel interpretation of Brentano's theory that casts it as more original than previously appreciated and yet quite plausible upon inspection. According to Brentano's theory, as interpreted here, a conscious experience of a tree is a mental state that can be simultaneously thought of, or framed, equally accurately as an awareness of a tree or an awareness of an awarene…Read more
  •  211
    Trope theory and the metaphysics of appearances
    American Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1): 5-20. 2004.
    The concept of appearance has had the historical misfortune of being associated with a Kantian or idealist program in metaphysics. Within this program, appearances are treated as "internal objects" that are immaterial and exert no causal powers over the physical world. However, there is a more mundane and innocuous notion of appearance, in which to say that x appears to y is just to say that y perceives x. In this more mundane sense of the term, an appearance is a perceived object ? qua perceive…Read more
  • Conscious Content
    Dissertation, Brown University. 2003.
    The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that mental states are conscious when, and only when, they are intentionally directed at themselves. Thus, if for subject x to perceive a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is intentionally directed at a tree, then for x to have a conscious perception of a tree is for x to harbor an internal state which is primarily directed at the tree and secondarily directed at itself. If so, consciousness is reductively explicable in terms of intentio…Read more
  •  320
    Moral phenomenology: Foundational issues
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (1): 1-19. 2008.
    In this paper, I address the what, the how, and the why of moral phenomenology. I consider first the question What is moral phenomenology?, secondly the question How to pursue moral phenomenology?, and thirdly the question Why pursue moral phenomenology? My treatment of these questions is preliminary and tentative, and is meant not so much to settle them as to point in their answers’ direction
  •  2281
    The main thesis of this paper is twofold. In the first half of the paper, (§§1-2), I argue that there are two notions of mental representation, which I call objective and subjective. In the second part (§§3-7), I argue that this casts familiar tracking theories of mental representation as incomplete: while it is clear how they might account for objective representation, they at least require supplementation to account for subjective representation.
  •  2519
    It is a curious fact about mainstream discussions of animal rights that they are dominated by consequentialist defenses thereof, when consequentialism in general has been on the wane in other areas of moral philosophy. In this paper, I describe an alternative, non‐consequentialist ethical framework and argue that it grants animals more expansive rights than consequentialist proponents of animal rights typically grant. The cornerstone of this non‐consequentialist framework is the thought that the…Read more
  •  3
    Interpretation: Its Scope and Limits
    In Allan Hazlett (ed.), New Waves in Metaphysics, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
    According to interpretivism, all there is to having an intentional property is being best interpreted as having it. I present a regress-or-circularity argument against this. In §1, I elucidate interpretivism, and in §2, I present the argument against it.
  •  2532
    Thought and Thing: Brentano's Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3): 153-180. 2015.
    The ontological theory of the later Franz Brentano is often referred to as ‘reism.’ But what exactly is reism, and how is it related to modern-day nominalism? In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Brentano’s reism as a specific variety of nominalism. This variety, although motivated by distinctly modern concerns about truthmakers, adopts a strategy for providing such truthmakers that is completely foreign to modern nominalism. The strategy rests on proliferation of coincident concrete part…Read more
  •  156
    The Varieties of Consciousness
    Oxford University Press. 2015.
    Recent work on consciousness has featured a number of debates on the existence and character of controversial types of phenomenal experience. Perhaps the best-known is the debate over the existence of a sui generis, irreducible cognitive phenomenology – a phenomenology proper to thought. Another concerns the existence of a sui generis phenomenology of agency. Such debates bring up a more general question: how many types of sui generis, irreducible, basic, primitive phenomenology do we have to po…Read more