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166Routledge philosophy guidebook to Locke on human understandingRoutledge. 1995.Locke on Human Understanding, is a comprehensive introduction to John Locke's major work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Locke's Essay remains a key work in many philosophical fields, notably in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophies of mind and language. In addition, Locke is often referred to as the first English empiricist. Knowledge of this influential work and figure is essential to Enlightenment thought. E. J. Lowe's approach enables students to effectively study the Essay …Read more
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1Sortal Terms and Natural Laws: An Essay on the Ontological Status of the Laws of NatureAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 17 (4): 253-260. 1980.
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323The Possibility of Metaphysics: Substance, Identity, and TimeClarendon Press. 1998.Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by identifying the categories of being and the relations between them. He sets out his own original metaphysical system, within which he seeks to answer many of the deepest questions in philosophy. 'a very rich book... deserves to be read ca…Read more
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22Objects and criteria of identityIn R. Hole & C. Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell. 1997.'Object' and 'criterion of identity' are philosophical terms of art whose application lies at a considerable theoretical remove from the surface phenomena of everyday linguistic usage. This partly explains their highly controversial status, for their point of application lies precisely where the concerns of linguists and philosophers of language merge with those of metaphysicians. This chapter explains the possession of determinate identity‐conditions. It argues that the distinction between 'abs…Read more
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1Experience and its objectsIn Tim Crane (ed.), The Contents of Experience, Cambridge University Press. 1992.
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62Real metaphysics, edited by Hallvard Lillehammer and Gonzalo Rodriguez-pereyraEuropean Journal of Philosophy 16 (1). 2008.
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Identity, vagueness, and modalityIn José Luis Bermúdez (ed.), Thought, Reference, and Experience: Themes From the Philosophy of Gareth Evans, Clarendon Press. 2005.
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2Non-Cartesian DualismIn John Heil (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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57Complex Reality: Unity, Simplicity, and Complexity in a Substance OntologyIn Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday, Ontos Verlag. pp. 5--338. 2013.
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61Wright versus Lewis on the Transitivity of CounterfactualsAnalysis 44 (4). 1984.E. J. Lowe; Wright versus Lewis on the transitivity of counterfactuals, Analysis, Volume 44, Issue 4, 1 October 1984, Pages 180–183, https://doi.org/10.1093/ana.
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15Review. Notes on philosophy, probability and mathematics. FP Ramsey (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 300-301. 1997.
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70Substance and SelfhoodPhilosophy 66 (255): 81-99. 1991.How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of s…Read more
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27Is Conceptualist Realism a Stable Position?Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2): 456-461. 2007.
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1655Causal closure principles and emergentismPhilosophy 75 (294): 571-586. 2000.Causal closure arguments against interactionist dualism are currently popular amongst physicalists. Such an argument appeals to some principles of the causal closure of the physical, together with certain other premises, to conclude that at least some mental events are identical with physical events. However, it is crucial to the success of any such argument that the physical causal closure principle to which it appeals is neither too strong nor too weak by certain standards. In this paper, it i…Read more
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2A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays Edited by A. Phillips Griffiths Cambridge University Press, 1991, v + 239 pp., £12.95 (review)Philosophy 68 (263): 107-108. 1993.
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114There are no easy problems of consciousnessJournal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 266-71. 1995.This paper challenges David Chalmers' proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the `easy' ones and the `hard' one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential `qualia' resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby …Read more
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248Locke on Real Essence and Water as a Natural Kind: A Qualified DefenceAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 85 (1): 1-19. 2011.‘Water is H2O’ is one of the most frequently cited sentences in analytic philosophy, thanks to the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam in the 1970s on the semantics of natural kind terms. Both of these philosophers owe an intellectual debt to the empiricist metaphysics of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while disagreeing profoundly with Locke about the reality of natural kinds. Locke employs an intriguing example involving water to support his view that kinds (or ‘sp…Read more
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Physical Science |