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Part IV Must Science Validate All Knowledge?In A. J. Sanford & P. N. Johnson-Laird (eds.), The nature and limits of human understanding, T & T Clark. 2003.
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140“Tätigsein und die Erste-Person-Perspektive” (Agency and the first-person perspective)In Bruno Niederbacher & Edmund Runggaldier (eds.), Was Sind Menschliche Personen?: Ein Akttheoretischer Zugang, Onto Verlag. 2008.It is no news that you and I are agents as well as persons. Agency and personhood are surely connected, but it is not obvious just how they are connected. I believe that being a person and being an agent are intimately linked by what I call a ‘first-person perspective’: All persons and all agents have first-person perspectives. Even so, the connection between personhood and agency is not altogether straightforward. There are different kinds of agents, and there are different kinds of first-perso…Read more
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317The shrinking difference between artifacts and natural objectsAmerican Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers. 2008.Artifacts are objects intentionally made to serve a given purpose; natural objects come into being without human intervention. I shall argue that this difference does not signal any ontological deficiency in artifacts qua artifacts. After sketching my view of artifacts as ordinary objects, I’ll argue that ways of demarcating genuine substances do not draw a line with artifacts on one side and natural objects on the other. Finally, I’ll suggest that philosophers have downgraded artifacts because …Read more
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Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the MindBehavior and Philosophy 24 (2): 181-186. 1996.
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120Folk psychologyIn Robert Andrew Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, Mit Press. 1999.In recent years, folk psychology has become a topic of debate not just among philosophers, but among development psychologists and primatologists as well
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41On the twofold nature of artefactsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 37 (1): 132-136. 2006.
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23The Nature of True Minds (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (2): 475-478. 1995.
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138Are beliefs brain states?In Anthonie Meijers (ed.), Explaining Beliefs: Lynne Rudder Baker and Her Critics, Stanford: Csli Publications. 2001.During the past couple of decades, philosophy of mind--with its siblings, philosophy of psychology and cognitive science--has been one of the most exciting areas of philosophy. Yet, in that time, I have come to think that there is a deep flaw in the basic conception of its object of study--a deep flaw in its conception of the so-called propositional attitudes, like belief, desire, and intention. Taking belief as the fundamental propositional attitude, scientifically-minded philosophers hold that…Read more
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3Nonreductive MaterialsimIn Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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10"Thought and Object: Essays on Intentionality" edited by Andrew Woodfield (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1): 137. 1984.
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64Comments on Hubert L. Dreyfus “intelligence without representation”Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 411-412. 2002.
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324After centuries of reflection, the issue of human freedom remains vital largely because of its connection to moral responsibility. When I ask—What is human freedom?—I mean to be asking what kind of freedom is required for moral responsibility? Questions about moral responsibility are intimately connected to questions about social policy and justice; so, the issue of moral responsibility—of desert, of whether or not anyone is ever really praiseworthy or blameworthy—has practical as well as theore…Read more
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Must science validate all knowledge?In A. J. Sanford & P. N. Johnson-Laird (eds.), The nature and limits of human understanding, T & T Clark. 2003.
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254The ontological status of personsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 370-388. 2002.Throughout his illustrious career, Roderick Chisholm was concerned with the nature of persons. On his view, persons are what he called ‘entia per se.’ They exist per se, in their own right. I too have developed an account of persons—I call it the ‘Constitution View’—an account that is different in important ways from Chisholm’s. Here, however, I want to focus on a thesis that Chisholm and I agree on: that persons have ontological significance in virtue of being persons. Although I’ll make the no…Read more
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3Conscious and unconscious intentionality in practical realismMeQRiMa Rivista Di Analisi Testo Letterario E Figurativo 5 130-135. 2002.1. Suppose that John and Jane are junior colleagues in an academic department of a university. John, who thinks of Jane as his competitor, has seen her flirt with the head of the department. He tells his other colleagues that Jane is trying to gain an unfair advantage over him. He comes to dislike Jane, and often in conversation with people outside the department, he enjoys saying bad things about Jane.
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62My main reaction to "Intelligence without representation" is to applaud. Dreyfus's use of Merleau-Ponty is a refreshing new breeze in philosophy of psychology. About twenty or so years ago, philosophers struck an unfortunate course..
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276Amie Thomasson has won well-deserved praise for her book, Ordinary Objects. She defends a commonsense world view and gives us “reason to think that there are fundamental particles, plants and animals, sticks and stones, tables and chairs, and even marriages and mortgages.” (p. 181) Ordinary objects comprise a vast array of things—natural objects both scientific and commonsensical, artifacts, organisms, abstract social objects.
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97What Am I?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (1): 151-159. 1999.Eric T. Olson has argued that any view of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity has a consequence that he considers untenable---namely, that he was never an early-term fetus. I have several replies. First, the psychological-continuity view of personal identity does not entail the putative consequence; the appearance to the contrary depends on not distinguishing between de re and de dicto theses. Second, the putative consequence is not untenable anyway; the appearance to the cont…Read more
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65Just what do we have in mind?Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1): 25-48. 1985.Nevertheless, I believe that, as it has been construed recently, the assumption is false. At the very least, it does not deserve the largely unquestioned status it enjoys, as I hope to show by a graduated series of thought experiments. I present the thought experiments as a series to expose a shared inadequacy in a variety of individualistic views, from type-type physicalism to the most sophisticated methodological solipsism; and I present them as graduated to suggest that having accepted the fi…Read more
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271Persons and other thingsJournal of Consciousness Studies 14 (5-6): 5-6. 2007.In the large recent literature on the nature of human persons, persons are usually studied in isolation from the world in which they live. What persons are most fundamentally, philosophers say, are human animals, or brains, or perhaps souls -- without any consideration of the social and physical environments without which persons would not exist. In this article, I want to compensate for such overly narrow focus. Instead of beginning with the nature of persons cut off from any environment, I sha…Read more
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168Temporal realityIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry S. Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, Bradford. 2010.Nonphilosophers, if they think of philosophy at all, wonder why people work in metaphysics. After all, metaphysics, as Auden once said of poetry, makes nothing happen.1 Yet some very intelligent people are driven to spend their lives exploring metaphysical theses. Part of what motivates metaphysicians is the appeal of grizzly puzzles (like the paradox of the heap or the puzzle of the ship of Theseus). But the main reason to work in metaphysics, for me at least, is to understand the shared world …Read more
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574The ontological argument simplifiedAnalysis 70 (2): 210-212. 2010.The ontological argument in Anselm’s Proslogion II continues to generate a remarkable store of sophisticated commentary and criticism. However, in our opinion, much of this literature ignores or misrepresents the elegant simplicity of the original argument. The dialogue below seeks to restore that simplicity, with one important modification. Like the original, it retains the form of a reductio, which we think is essential to the argument’s great genius. However, it seeks to skirt the difficult q…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Areas of Interest
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