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26A Defence SubstanceIn Alessandro Antonietti, Antonella Corradini & E. Jonathan Lowe (eds.), Psycho-Physical Dualism Today: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Lexington Books. pp. 167. 2008.
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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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34Review of Maria Elisabeth Reicher (ed.), States of Affairs (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (10). 2009.
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63Self, Reference and Self-ReferencePhilosophy 68 (263): 15-33. 1993.I favour an analysis of selfhood which ties it to the possession of certain kinds of first-person knowledge, in particular de re knowledge of the identity of one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. My defence of this analysis will lead me to explore the nature of demonstrative reference to one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. Such reference is typically ‘direct’, in contrast to demonstrative reference to all physical objects, apart from those that are parts of one's own body in wh…Read more
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50Powerful Particulars:Review Essay on John Heils From an Ontological Point of View (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (2): 466-479. 2007.John Heil's new book (Heil 2003) is remarkable in many ways. In a concise, lucid and accessible manner, it develops a complete system of ontology with many strikingly original features and then applies that ontology to fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind, with illuminating results. Although Heil acknowledges his intellectual debts to C. B. Martin (p. viii), he is unduly modest about his own contribution to the development and application of this novel metaphysical system. A full examina…Read more
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67Does the descriptivist/anti-descriptivist debate have any philosophical significance?Philosophical Books 48 (1): 27-33. 2007.
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324Material coincidence and the cinematographic fallacy: A response to OlsonPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (208): 369-372. 2002.Eric T. Olson has argued that those who hold that two material objects can exactly coincide at a moment of time, with one of these objects constituting the other, face an insuperable difficulty in accounting for the alleged differences between the objects, such as their being of different kinds and possessing different persistence-conditions. The differences, he suggests, are inexplicable, given that the objects in question are composed of the same particles related in precisely the same way. In…Read more
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284The definition of enduranceAnalysis 69 (2): 277-280. 2009.David Lewis, following in the tradition of Broad, Quine and Goodman, says that change in an object X consists in X's being temporally extended and having qualitatively different temporal parts. Analogously, change in a spatially extended object such as a road consists in its having different spatial parts . The alternative to this view is that ordinary objects undergo temporal change in virtue of having different intrinsic non-relational properties at different times. They endure, remaining the …Read more
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48Substance dualism : A non-cartesian approachIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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35Powers: A study in metaphysicsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4): 817--822. 2004.
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204Self, agency, and mental causationJournal of Consciousness Studies 6 (8-9): 225-239. 1999.A self or person does not appear to be identifiable with his or her organic body, nor with any part of it, such as the brain; and yet selves seem to be agents, capable of bringing about physical events as causal consequences of certain of their conscious mental states. How is this possible in a universe in which, it appears, every physical event has a sufficient cause which is wholly physical? The answer is that this is possible if a certain kind of naturalistic dualism is true, according to whi…Read more
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7On the individuation of powersIn Anna Marmodoro (ed.), The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Their Manifestations, Routledge. 2010.
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66Forms of Thought: A Study in Philosophical LogicCambridge University Press. 2013.Forms of thought are involved whenever we name, describe, or identify things, and whenever we distinguish between what is, might be, or must be the case. It appears to be a distinctive feature of human thought that we can have modal thoughts, about what might be possible or necessary, and conditional thoughts, about what would or might be the case if something else were the case. Even the simplest thoughts are structured like sentences, containing referential and predicative elements, and studyi…Read more
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76Review of D.m. Armstrong, Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (1). 2011.
Areas of Specialization
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Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Physical Science |