•  3
    Leibniz
    In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2017.
    Although one of the most important and prolific thinkers of all time, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) spent his life as a courtier, wasting time in diplomatic business or preparing documents to shore up claims of lineage or territory for his patrons. He also spent a good deal of time on practical matters of engineering, such as his dreams of a system of windmills that would have ameliorated the chronic flooding of the Harz silver mines, and on his visionary mechanical calculators. Most of …Read more
  •  2
    Thomas W. Polger, Natural Minds Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 24 (5): 354-356. 2004.
  •  1
    Leibniz Lexicon
    with Reinhard Finster, Graeme Hunter, Robert F. Mcrae, and Murray Miles
    Springer. 1990.
  •  1
    Thought and Syntax
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992 481-491. 1992.
    It has been argued that Psychological Externalism is irrelevant to psychology. The grounds for this are that PE fails to individuate intentional states in accord with causal power, and that psychology is primarily interested in the causal roles of psychological states. It is also claimed that one can individuate psychological states via their syntactic structure in some internal "language of thought". This syntactic structure is an internal feature of psychological states and thus provides a key…Read more
  •  1
    Thomas W. Polger, Natural Minds (review)
    Philosophy in Review 24 354-356. 2004.
  •  1
    Panpsychism
    In Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2009.
  •  1
    The constructed and the secret self
    In Andrew Brook & R. DeVidi (eds.), Self-Reference and Self-Awareness, John Benjamins. 2001.
  •  1
    The Worm in the Cheese Leibniz, Consciousness and Matter
    Studia Leibnitiana 23 (1): 79-91. 1991.
    Leibniz argumentiert in der Monadologie, daß das Bewußtsein nicht auf rein mechanische und materielle Prozesse reduziert werden kann. Diesem wohlbekannten Argument wird bisweilen ein elementarer Trugschluß der Zusammensetzung vorgeworfen. Meiner Meinung nach hingegen weist dieses Argument eher auf ein grundlegendes Problem in unserem physikalischen Verständnis des menschlichen Geistes hin, einem Verständnis, das auch heute noch akzeptiert wird. Ich zeige jedoch weiterhin, daß Leibniz nicht erkan…Read more
  •  1
    Scientific Anti-Realism and the Epistemic Community
    PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1988 (1): 181-187. 1988.
    The ability to observe is the ability to reliably detect, but that is not all observation is. A thermometer reliably detects temperature yet does not observe the temperature, whereas I do, even though in terms of reliability I cannot match the thermometer. An observation is detection accompanied by active classification and, typically, the subsequent formation of opinion. Even when we say of an animal that it can see something we mean more than that it reliably detects things of a certain sort b…Read more
  • David Copp, ed., Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence and Disarmament (review)
    Philosophy in Review 8 436-438. 1988.
  • Metaphysics, Role in Science
    In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2017.
    We must begin with the admission that the term “metaphysics” does not have a very precise or agreed upon meaning (no more does “science”). In current philosophy of science, “metaphysics” is, by and large, a pejorative term applied to whatever is regarded as illicitly nonempirical. Traditionally, metaphysics is regarded as the study of what lies behind the world of appearance ‐ perhaps constitutes that world, but is itself the only true reality. Obviously, a great many people would regard science…Read more
  • Beyond theories: Cartwright and Hacking
    In James R. Brown (ed.), Philosophy of Science: The Key Thinkers, Continuum Books. pp. 213. 2012.
  • Physicalism
    In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2017.
    The crudest formulation of physicalism is simply the claim that everything is physical, and perhaps that is all physicalism ought to imply. But in fact a large number of distinct versions of physicalism are currently in play, with very different commitments and implications. There is no agreement about the detailed formulation of the doctrine, even though a majority of philosophers would claim to be physicalists, and a vast majority of them are physicalists of one sort or another. There are seve…Read more
  • Emergence and efficacy
    In Christina E. Erneling & David Martel Johnson (eds.), The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture, Oup Usa. 2005.
  • Materialism and the Foundations of Representation
    Dissertation, University of Toronto (Canada). 1981.
    This thesis divides into two main sections. The first is an attempt to show that the Psycho-physical Identity Theory is false, and is so even if we grant that human behaviour is in principle completely explicable in purely physical terms . This section is a sustained criticism of a staight-forward argument in favour of the Identity Theory, namely: Mental items cause behaviour. All behaviour is caused by physical items. So mental items are physical items. ;This section is also divisible into two …Read more
  • Jerry A. Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (review)
    Philosophy in Review 4 58-60. 1984.
  • Supervenience and Determination
    In W. H. Newton‐Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2017.
    In the mid‐part of the twentieth century, the union of youthful science and the ancient philosophical dream of metaphysical completion begot a visionary doctrine known as the unity of science (see unity of science). This view of the relationship among scientific theories maintained that any theory aspiring to be truly “scientific” must fit into a hierarchy in which every theory was reducible to the theory immediately below it, save for the foundational theory of physics. Reduction would be accom…Read more
  • Naturalizing the Mind (review)
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 83-109. 1997.