•  276
    Amie 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.
  •  97
    What 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
  •  65
    Just 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
  •  271
    Persons and other things
    Journal 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
  •  168
    Temporal reality
    In 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
  •  52
    Content meets consciousness
    Philosophical Topics 22 (1/2): 1-22. 1994.
  •  110
    On Making Things Up
    Philosophical Topics 30 (1): 31-51. 2002.
  •  271
    De re belief in action
    Philosophical Review 91 (3): 363-387. 1982.
  •  354
    Naturalism and the first-person perspective
    In Georg Gasser (ed.), How Successful is Naturalism?, Ontos Verlag. pp. 203-226. 2007.
    The first-person perspective is a challenge to naturalism. Naturalistic theories are relentlessly third-personal. The first-person perspective is, well, first-personal; it is the perspective from which one thinks of oneself as oneself* without the aid of any third-person name, description, demonstrative or other referential device. The exercise of the capacity to think of oneself in this first-personal way is the necessary condition of all our self-knowledge, indeed of all our self-consciousness…Read more
  •  185
    What is this thing called 'commonsense psychology'?
    Philosophical Explorations 2 (1): 3-19. 1999.
    What is this thing called ‘Commonsense Psychology’? The first matter to settle is what the issue is here. By ‘commonsense psychology,’ I mean primarily the systems of describing, explaining and predicting human thought and action in terms of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, expectations, intentions and other so-called propositional attitudes. Although commonsense psychology encompasses more than propositional attitudes--e.g., emotions, traits and abilities are also within its purview--belief-desi…Read more
  •  796
    Swinburne on Substance Dualism
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (2): 5--15. 2014.
  •  29
    In his neglected treatise on education, the great eighteenth-century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, mentions that Benjamin Franklin “wondered why everyone didn’t learn to swim, since swimming is so pleasant and so useful.” Franklin..
  •  574
    The ontological argument simplified
    with Gareth B. Matthews
    Analysis 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
  •  94
    Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions
    In Patrick Grim (ed.), Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, Automatic Press. 2009.
    After an undergraduate degree with a major in mathematics, I turned to philosophy—in part because philosophy had all the interest of math (and logic) plus an indefinitely wide range of subject matter. I began philosophy at an intersection of metaphysics and philosophy of science. My dissertation, Ontological and Linguistic Aspects of Temporal Becoming, was on the philosophy of time. A convinced physicalist, I defended the idea that past, present and future (the A-series) are merely “mind-depende…Read more
  •  7
    Through the ages, Christians have almost automatically been Mind-Body dualists. The Bible portrays us as spiritual beings, and one obvious way to be a spiritual being is to be (or to have) an immaterial soul. Since it is also evident that we have bodies, Christians naturally have thought of themselves as composite beings, made of two substances—a material body and a nonmaterial soul. Despite the historical weight of this position, I do not think that it is required either by Scripture or by Chri…Read more
  •  153
    I want to raise a question for which I have no definitive answer. The question is how to understand first-personal phenomena—phenomena that that can be discerned only from a first-personal point of view. The question stems from reflection on two claims: First, the claim of scientific naturalism that all phenomena can be described and explained by science; and second, the claim of science that everything within its purview is intersubjectively accessible, and hence that all science is constructed…Read more
  •  8
    Book Reviews (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (4): 597-598. 2003.
    Book Information Objects and Persons. Objects and Persons Trenton Merricks. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001, pp. xii + 203, £30, £14.99. By Trenton Merricks. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pp. xii + 203. £30, £14.99
  •  455
    When does a person begin?
    Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2): 25-48. 2005.
    According to the Constitution View of persons, a human person is wholly constituted by (but not identical to) a human organism. This view does justice both to our similarities to other animals and to our uniqueness. As a proponent of the Constitution View, I defend the thesis that the coming-into-existence of a human person is not simply a matter of the coming-into-existence of an organism, even if that organism ultimately comes to constitute a person. Marshalling some support from developmental…Read more
  •  61
    Replies (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3): 623-635. 2002.
    Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.
  •  115
    Attitudes in action: A causal account
    Manuscrito 25 (3): 47-78. 2002.
    This article aims to vindicate the commonsensical view that what we think affects what we do. In order to show that mental properties like believing, desiring and intending are causally explanatory, I propose a nonreductive, materialistic account that identifies beliefs and desires by their content, and that shows how differences in the contents of beliefs and desires can make causal differences in what we do.
  •  248
    We run into instances of material constitution everywhere we turn. Material constitution is the relation that obtains between an octagonal piece of metal and a Stop sign, between strands of DNA molecules and genes, between pieces of paper and dollar bills, between stones and monuments, between lumps of clay and statues, between human persons and their bodies—the list is endless. Although there has been a great deal of controversy recently about the nature of material constitution, I want to ente…Read more
  •  80
    Identity across time: A defense of three-dimensionalism
    In Benedikt Schick, Edmund Runggaldier & Ludger Honnefelder (eds.), Unity and Time in Metaphysics, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 1-14. 2009.
  •  71
    Has content been naturalized?
    In Barry M. Loewer (ed.), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.
    The Representational Theory of the Mind (RTM) has been forcefully and subtly developed by Jerry A. Fodor. According to the RTM, psychological states that explain behavior involve tokenings of mental representations. Since the RTM is distinguished from other approaches by its appeal to the meaning or "content" of mental representations, a question immediately arises: by virtue of what does a mental representation express or represent an environmental property like coto or shoe? This question asks…Read more
  •  80
    “Form follows function,” the slogan of modernist architecture, could well be a slogan of artefacts generally. Since the choice of material for a tool is guided by the function of the tool, we may be tempted to think that having a functional nature distinguishes artefacts from natural objects. But that would be a mistake. Certain natural objects—especially biological entities like mammalian hearts—have functional natures too.
  •  385
    The ontology of artifacts
    Philosophical Explorations 7 (2). 2004.
    Beginning with Aristotle, philosophers have taken artifacts to be ontologically deficient. This paper proposes a theory of artifacts, according to which artifacts are ontologically on a par with other material objects. I formulate a nonreductive theory that regards artifacts as constituted by - but not identical to - aggregates of particles. After setting out the theory, I rebut a number of arguments that disparage the ontological status of artifacts.
  •  175
    Everyday concepts as a guide to reality
    The Monist 89 (3): 313-333. 2006.
    On September 11, 2001, as everyone knows, the towers of the World Trade Center in New York were attacked. I want to discuss this event in order to motivate a nonreductionist view of the extensions of everyday concepts. Next, I shall set out, and begin to defend, the particular view of nonreductionism that I favor—the Constitution View. Then, I shall consider two venerable metaphysical issues (the nature of vagueness and the mind-independent/mind- dependent distinction) in light of the Constituti…Read more
  •  142
    A farewell to functionalism
    Philosophical Studies 48 (July): 1-14. 1985.
    dilemma, a dilemma concerning the individuation of psychological states that explain behavior. Beliefs are individuated by most functionahsts in terms of that 'that'-clauses; functional states are individuated 'narrowly' (i.e.