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24Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style ScenariosPhilosophical Topics 24 (2): 123-141. 1996.Traditional libertarians about freedom of choice and action and about moral responsibility are hard-line incompatibilists. They claim that these freedoms (which they believe to be possessed by at least some human beings) are incompatible with determinism, and they take the same view of moral responsibility. I call them hard libertarians. A softer line is available to theorists who have libertarian sympathies. A theorist may leave it open that freedom of choice and action and moral responsibil…Read more
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58Aristotle on the Roles of Reason in Motivation and JustificationArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 66 (22). 1984.In this paper I shall attempt to answer to questions about the relationship, in Aristotle's ethical thought and the practical intellect to practical ends. The first is a question about motivation, and second is a question about justification. I shall argue that the practical intellect has important work to do in both connections.
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14Michael A. Simon: "Understanding Human Action" (review)The Thomist 48 (1): 121. 1984.A book review of Michael A. Simon's Understanding Human Action: Social Explanation of the Vision of Social Science.
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237Libertarianism, luck, and controlPacific Philosophical Quarterly 86 (3): 381-407. 2005.This article critically examines recent work on free will and moral responsibility by Randolph Clarke, Robert Kane, and Timothy O’Connor in an attempt to clarify issues about control and luck that are central to the debate between libertarians (agent causationists and others) and their critics. It is argued that luck poses an as yet unresolved problem for libertarians.
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1CHAPTER 3. Self-Deception without PuzzlesIn Self-Deception Unmasked, Princeton University Press. pp. 50-75. 2001.
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23Free Will and Consciousness: An Introduction and Overview of PerspectivesIn Al Mele, Kathleen Vohs & Roy Baumeister (eds.), Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? (New York: OUP, 2010), Oxford University Press. 2010.This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating how free will and consciousness might operate. It draws from philosophy and psychology, the two fields that have grappled most fundamentally with these issues. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors explore such issues as how free will is connected to rational choice, planning, and self-control; roles for consciousness in decision ma…Read more
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11Self-Deception and Hypothesis TestingIn M. Marraffa, M. Caro & F. Ferretti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: Philosophy and Psychology in Intersection, Springer. 2007.The present book is a collection of essays exploring some classical dimensions of mind both from the perspective of an empirically-informed philosophy and from the point of view of a philosophically-informed psychology. In the last three decades, the level of interaction between philosophy and psychology has increased dramatically. As a contribution to this trend, this book explores some areas in which this interaction has been very productive – or, at least, highly provocative. The interaction …Read more
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109Actions, Explanations, and CausesIn Giuseppina D'Oro & Constantine Sandis (eds.), Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Non-causalism in the Philosophy of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. 2013.
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278Justifying intentionsMind 102 (406): 335-337. 1993.In his "Purposive Intending" T.L.M. Pink (1991) instructively criticized a popular view about intentions and advanced an alternative position of his own. I challenged a pair of theses to which Pink's position committed him (Mele 1992a). Pink now agrees that both theses are false. His mistake, he says, was to express his view in terms of reasons; his position is now to be framed in terms of "justifications" (1993).
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680When Are We Self-Deceived?Humana Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies (20). 2012.This article‘s point of departure is a proto-analysis that I have suggested of entering self-deception in acquiring a belief and an associated set of jointly sufficient conditions for self-deception that I have proposed. Partly with the aim of fleshing out an important member of the proposed set of conditions, I provide a sketch of my view about how selfdeception happens. I then return to the proposed set of jointly sufficient conditions and offer a pair of amendments.
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CHAPTER 2. Garden-Variety Straight Self-Deception: Some Psychological ProcessesIn Self-Deception Unmasked, Princeton University Press. pp. 25-49. 2001.
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83Persisting intentionsNoûs 41 (4). 2007.Al is nearly finished sweeping his kitchen floor when he notices, on a counter, a corkscrew that should be put in a drawer. He intends to put the corkscrew away as soon as he is finished with the floor; but by the time he returns the broom and dustpan to the closet, he has forgotten what he intended to do. Al knows (or has a true belief) that there is something he intended to do now in the kitchen. He gazes around the room and tries to recall what it was. Within a minute or so, without seeing th…Read more
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52Rational Intentions and the Toxin PuzzleProto Sociology 8 39-52. 1996.Gregory Kavka’s toxin puzzle has spawned a lively literature about the nature of intention and of rational intention in particular. This paper is largely a critique of a pair of recent responses to the puzzle that focus on the connection between rationally forming an intention to A and rationally A-ing, one by David Gauthier and the other by Edward McClennen. It also critically assesses the two main morals Kavka takes reflection on the puzzle to support, morals about the nature of intention and …Read more
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38Self-deception and akratic belief: A rejoinderPhilosophical Psychology 1 (2): 201-206. 1988.Self-deception is standardly viewed as a motivated phenomenon in both the philosophical and the psychological literature. In Irrationality, I maintain that it is at least characteristically motivated. Knight's provocative thesis, that there is an important unmotivated species of self-deception, is consistent with this. Still, if she is right, I overlooked a kind of self-deception that merits close attention.
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217Agency and mental actionPhilosophical Perspectives 11 231-249. 1997.My question here is whether there are intentional mental actions that generate special, significant threats to causalism (i.e., threats of a kind not generated by intentional overt actions), or that generate, more poi- gnantly, problems for causalism that some intentional overt actions allegedly generate, as well.
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10Incontinent BeliefJournal of Philosophical Research 16 197-212. 1991.Brian McLaughlin, in “Incontinent Belief” (Journal of Philosophical Research 15 [1989-90], pp. 115-26), takes issue with my investigation, in lrrationality (Oxford University Press, 1987), of a doxastic analogue of akratic action. He deems what I term “strict akratic belief” philosophically uninteresting. In the present paper, I explain that this assessment rests on a serious confusion about the sort of possibility that is at issue in my chapter on the topic, correct a variety of misimpressions,…Read more
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7The Structure of Emotions (review)Philosophical Books 29 (4): 224-225. 1988.A book review of Robert M. Gordon's The Structure of Emotions.
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CHAPTER 4. Attempted Empirical Demonstrations of Strict Self-DeceptionIn Self-Deception Unmasked, Princeton University Press. pp. 76-93. 2001.
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43Motivational TiesJournal of Philosophical Research 16 431-442. 1991.Must a rational ass equidistant from two equally attractive bales of hay starve for lack of a reason to prefer one bale to the other? Must a human being faced with a comparable, explicitly motivational, tie fail to pursue either option? Surely, one suspects, some practical resolution is possible. Surely, ties of either sort need not result in death or paralysis. But why? Donald Davidson has suggested that, in the human case, resolution depends upon the tie’s being broken---upon the agent’s comin…Read more
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15Intention and LiteratureStanford French Review 16 173-196. 1992.The issues of authorial intentions and interpretations are discussed. The philosophical dispute between metaphysical realists and metaphysical antirealists on authorial intentions and how these are characterized is examined. While realists maintain that a mind-independent reality exists, antirealists claim that reality is completely mind-dependent and that all things are mere mental constructions.
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44Folk conceptions of intentional actionPhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 281-297. 2012.Studies designed to help us understand how nonspecialists conceive of intentional action have generated some widely discussed results. To what extent are the results accounted for by the existence of different folk conceptions of intentional action? That is my guiding question in this article. I am not in a position to offer a full answer, but I do hope to make some progress.
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40Evaluating Emotional Responses to FictionIn Mette Hjort & Sue Laver (eds.), Emotion and the Arts, Oup Usa. 1997.Philosophical discussion of emotional responses to fiction has been dominated by work on the paradox of fiction, which is often construed as asking whether and how we can experience genuine emotions in reaction to fiction. One may also ask more generally how we ought to respond to fictional works, a question that has to do both with what we should do when reacting to fiction and with what we should and should not let happen to us. It is possible to delineate any principles regarding the rational…Read more
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120Intentional action, folk judgments, and stories: Sorting things outMidwest Studies in Philosophy 31 (1). 2007.How are our actions sorted into those that are intentional and those that are not? The philosophical and psychological literature on this topic is livelier now than ever, and we seek to make a contribution to it here. Our guiding question in this article is easy to state and hard to answer: How do various factors— specifically, features of vignettes—that contribute to majority folk judgments that an action is or is not intentional interact in producing the judgment? In pursuing this question we …Read more
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309The philosophy of action (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1997.The latest offering in the highly successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, The Philosophy of Action features contributions from twelve leading figures in the field, including: Robert Audi, Michael Bratman, Donald Davidson, Wayne Davis, Harry Frankfurt, Carl Ginet, Gilbert Harman, Jennifer Hornsby, Jaegwon Kim, Hugh McCann, Paul Moser, and Brian O'Shaughnessy. Alfred Mele provides an introductory essay on the topics chosen and the questions they deal with. Topics addressed include intenti…Read more
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133Another Scientific Threat to Free Will?The Monist 95 (3): 422-440. 2012.In Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will (Mele 2009), I argue that scientists—neuroscientists and others—have not proved that free will is an illusion and have not produced powerful evidence for that claim. Manuel Vargas has suggested that in that book I ignore a serious scientific threat to free will (2009). The alleged threat is identified in section 1. It is the topic of this article.
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114Moral responsibility and the continuation problemPhilosophical Studies 162 (2): 237-255. 2013.Typical incompatibilists about moral responsibility and determinism contend that being basically morally responsible for a decision one makes requires that, if that decision has proximal causes, it is not deterministically caused by them. This article develops a problem for this contention that resembles what is sometimes called the problem of present (or cross-world) luck. However, the problem makes no reference to luck nor to contrastive explanation. This article also develops a solution.
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27Akratic Action and the Practical Role of Better JudgmentPacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1): 33-47. 1991.
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |