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24The Body of the Mind-Body ProblemAnnals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science 9 (4): 207-217. 1999.
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144Practice makes perfect: the effect of dance training on the aesthetic judgePhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (1): 59-68. 2012.According to Hume, experience in observing art is one of the prerequisites for being an ideal art critic. But although Hume extols the value of observing art for the art critic, he says little about the value, for the art critic, of executing art. That is, he does not discuss whether ideal aesthetic judges should have practiced creating the form of art they are judging. In this paper, I address this issue. Contrary to some contemporary philosophers who claim that experience in creating art is ir…Read more
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58Is monitoring one’s actions causally relevant to choking under pressure?Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (2): 379-395. 2015.I have a painfully vivid memory of performing the Venezuelan choreographer Vincente Nebrada’s ballet Pentimento.After graduating from high school at age 15 and before entering college, I spent a number of years working as a professional ballet dancer with North Carolina Dance Theatre , among other companies. I was a new member of North Carolina Dance Theatre, and although the company had presented the piece on a number of occasions, this was the first time the director was watching from the audi…Read more
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210Must Physicalism Imply the Supervenience of the Mental on the Physical?Journal of Philosophy 110 (2): 93-110. 2013.
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208Physicalism in an infinitely decomposable worldErkentnis 64 (2): 177-191. 2006.Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all …Read more
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80Effortless Bodily MovementPhilosophical Topics 39 (1): 67-79. 2011.What is it for a bodily movement to be effortless? What are we appreciating when we admire a dancer’s effortless leaps, a basketball player’s effortless shot, or even a seagull’s effortless soar? I propose to explore the notion of effortlessness by distinguishing various kinds of effortless bodily movements, examining the idea that effortless movements are smooth, predictable ones, discussing the relations between effortlessness and difficulty and effortlessness and actual ease, and speculating …Read more
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74Really taking metaphysics seriouslyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 632-633. 2004.Ross & Spurrett (R&S) fail to take metaphysics seriously because they do not make a clear enough distinction between how we understand the world and what the world is really like. Although they show that the behavioral and cognitive sciences are genuinely explanatory, it is not clear that they have shown that these special sciences identify properties that are genuinely causal.
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911Post-physicalismJournal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2): 61-80. 2001.I am going to argue that it is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind-body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level entirely nonmental. The mind-body problem, I want …Read more
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156Varieties of causal closureIn Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action, Imprint Academic. pp. 173-187. 2003.
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40Physicalism in an Infinitely Decomposable WorldErkenntnis 64 (2): 177-191. 2006.Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all …Read more
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99Affective ProprioceptionJanus Head 9 (2): 299-317. 2007.Proprioception has been considered, within neuroscience, in the context of the control of movement. Here we discuss a possible second role for this 'sixth sense', pleasure in and of movement,homologous with the recently described affective touch. We speculate on its evolution and place in human society and suggest that pleasure in movement may depend not on feedback but also on harmony between intention and action. Examples come from expert movers, dancers and sportsmen, and from those without p…Read more
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62Rethinking the Mind-Body ProblemIn Maureen Eckert (ed.), Theories of Mind: An Introductory Reader, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 250. 2006.
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180Proprioception as an aesthetic senseJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2): 231-242. 2006.
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223What does the conservation of energy have to do with physicalism?Dialectica 60 (4): 383-396. 2006.The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of …Read more
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139Proprioceiving someone else's movementPhilosophical Explorations 9 (2). 2006.Proprioception - the sense by which we come to know the positions and movements of our bodies - is thought to be necessarily confined to the body of the perceiver. That is, it is thought that while proprioception can inform you as to whether your left knee is bent or straight, it cannot inform you as to whether someone else's knee is bent or straight. But while proprioception certainly provides us with information about the positions and movements of our own bodies, I will argue that it does mor…Read more
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123Consciousness Is Puzzling, but Not Paradoxical (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1): 213-226. 2004.In Purple Haze: the Puzzle of Consciousness, Joseph Levine tells us that the mind-body problem
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187Physicalism could be true even if Mary learns something newPhilosophical Quarterly 57 (227): 176-189. 2007.Mary knows all there is to know about physics, chemistry and neurophysiology, yet has never experienced colour. Most philosophers think that if Mary learns something genuinely new upon seeing colour for the first time, then physicalism is false. I argue, however, that physicalism is consistent with Mary's acquisition of new information. Indeed, even if she has perfect powers of deduction, and higher-level physical facts are a priori deducible from lower-level ones, Mary may still lack concepts w…Read more
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185What is the physicalIn Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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35Review: Consciousness Is Puzzling, but Not Paradoxical (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1). 2004.In Purple Haze: the Puzzle of Consciousness, Joseph Levine tells us that the mind-body problem
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174Does bodily awareness interfere with highly skilled movement?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (2). 2010.It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-de…Read more
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178The Epistemic/Ontic DividePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2): 404-418. 2003.A number of philosophers think that, while we cannot explain how the mind is physical, we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. That is, they accept both the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical and ontological physicalism. I argue that this position is unstable. Among other things, I argue that once one accepts the explanatory gap, the main argument for ontological physicalism, the argument from causation, looses its force. For if one takes physicaVnonphysical causation and …Read more
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |