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D.N. Walton, "Courage: A philosophical investigation"International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 23 (2): 117. 1988.
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3GF Schueler, Desire: Its Role in Practical Reason and the Explanation of Action (review)Minds and Machines 6 253-256. 1996.
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15The Significance of Free Will (review)Journal of Philosophy 95 (11): 581-584. 1998.A book review of Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will.
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43Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry FrankfurtAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2): 292-295. 2003.Book Information Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. Edited by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton. MIT Press. Cambridge MA. 2002. Pp. 381.
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15Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? (New York: OUP, 2010) (edited book)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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41Motivation and IntentionJournal of Philosophical Research 21 51-67. 1996.This essay defends the compatibility of a pair of popular theses in the philosophy of action and rebuts arguments of Hugh McCann’s (1995) designed to show that my earlier efforts, in Springs of Action, to resolve the apparent tension were unsuccessful. One thesis links what agents intentionally do at a time, t, to what they are most strongly motivated to do at t. The other is a thesis about the nature and functions of intent.
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101Free Will and ScienceIn Robert Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook on Free Will, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press. 2011.This article examines the work of two figures in fields whose work has had a significant impact on recent free-will debates, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and psychologist Daniel Wegner. Libet's groundbreaking experimental studies on human subjects relating brain activities to the appearance or production of conscious experience, volition, and willed action have been much discussed by philosophers and scientists over the past few decades and have influenced subsequent scientific research on thes…Read more
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142A Dialogue on Free Will and ScienceOup Usa. 2013.A Dialogue on Free Will and Science is a brief and intriguing book discussing the scientific challenges of free will. Presented through a dialogue, the format allows ideas to emerge and be clarified and then evaluated in a natural way. Engaging and accessible, it offers students a compelling look at free will and science
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23Responsibility and freedom: The challenge of Frankfurt-style-casesIn Monika Betzler & Barbara Guckes (eds.), Autonomes Handeln: Beitrage Zur Philosophie von Harry G. Frankfurt, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 2000.
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70Is there a place for intention in an analysis of intentional action?Philosophia 27 (3-4): 419-432. 1999.My concern here with the possibility of an acceptable intention-involving explication of intentional action is, specifically, a concern with the possibility of such an explication that treats intentions as attitudes.
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43Conscious Deciding and the Science of Free WillIn Roy Baumeister, Alfred Mele & Kathleen Vohs (eds.), Free will and consciousness: how might they work?, Oxford University Press. pp. 43. 2010.Mele's chapter addresses two primary aims. The first is to develop an experimentally useful conception of conscious deciding. The second is to challenge a certain source of skepticism about free will: the belief that conscious decisions and intentions are never involved in producing corresponding overt actions. The challenge Mele develops has a positive dimension that accords with the aims of this volume: It sheds light on a way in which some conscious decisions and intentions do seem to be effi…Read more
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16Passive ActionIn Ghita Holmström-Hintikka & Raimo Tuomela (eds.), Contemporary Action Theory, Volume 1, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1997.Peter was placed — face down and head first — on a sled, and pushed from the top of a high, snow-covered hill. The brisk wind and flying snow swiftly awoke him. In moments, he had his wits about him and surmised that this early morning trip down the hill was part of his initiation into the SAE fraternity. Peter quickly surveyed his options. He could put an end to his trip by sliding off the sled, or by turning it sharply. He could grasp the steering handles and guide the sled down the slope. Or,…Read more
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83Soft libertarianism and Frankfurt-style scenariosPhilosophical Topics 24 (2): 123-41. 1996.This paper develops a soft-libertarian response to Frankfurt-style cases and to the threat that such cases apparently pose to any brand of libertarianism.
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15Free Action, Moral Responsibility, and Alternative Possibilities: Frankfurt-style Cases RevisitedIn Francesca Castellani & Josef Quitterer (eds.), Agency and Causation in the Human Sciences, Mentis Verlag. 2007.
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70Against a belief/desire analysis of intentionPhilosophia 18 (2-3): 239-242. 1988.An influential belief/desire analysis of intention proposed by robert audi does not provide sufficient conditions for intention. Intending to "a" entails being settled upon "a"-Ing (or upon trying to "a"), And it entails being willing to "a". But an agent can satisfy audi's conditions for intending to "a" and yet be neither settled upon "a"-Ing (or trying to "a") nor willing to "a". The objection raised poses a serious problem for belief/desire analyses of intention in general
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52Vetoing and ConsciousnessIn Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein & Tillmann Vierkant (eds.), Decomposing the Will, Oxford University Press Usa. 2013.This chapter’s topic is Benjamin Libet’s position on vetoing. To veto a conscious decision, intention, or urge is to decide not to act on it and to refrain, accordingly, from acting on it. Libet associates veto power with some fancy metaphysics. This chapter sets the metaphysical issues aside and concentrates on the empirical ones, focusing on neuroscientific research that bears on vetoing.
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161On Pereboom’s Disappearing Agent ArgumentCriminal Law and Philosophy 11 (3): 561-574. 2017.This article is a critical discussion of Derk Pereboom’s “disappearing agent objection” to event-causal libertarianism in his Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. This objection is an important plank in Pereboom’s argument for free will skepticism. It is intended to knock event-causal libertarianism, a leading pro-free-will view, out of contention. I explain why readers should not find the objection persuasive.
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32Incontinent 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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29Intentions and InterpretationsMLN 107 (5): 931-949. 1992.Even if everything is up for grabs in philosophy, some things are very difficult to doubt. It is hard to believe, for example, that no one ever acts intentionally. Even the most powerful arguments for the unreality of intentional action could do no more, we believe, than place one in roughly the position in which pre-Aristotelian Greeks found themselves when presented with one of Zeno's arguments that nothing can move from any given point A to any other point B. One argument has it, for example,…Read more
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70Self-control and beliefPhilosophical Psychology 7 (4). 1994.Although the extent to which motivational factors are involved in the production and sustaining of biased or 'irrational' beliefs continues to be a controversial issue in social psychology, even those who urge that such beliefs are often explained by non-motivational tendencies admit that biased beliefs sometimes have motivational sources. Sometimes toe are influenced by motivational pressures in ways proscribed by principles that we accept for belief-acquisition or belief-revision ('doxastic' p…Read more
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26Mental CausationRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 185 (1): 105-106. 1995.Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has…Read more
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170Twisted Self DeceptionPhilosophical Psychology 12 (2): 117-137. 1999.In instances of "twisted" self-deception, people deceive themselves into believing things that they do not want to be true. In this, twisted self-deception differs markedly from the "straight" variety that has dominated the philosophical and psychological literature on self-deception. Drawing partly upon empirical literature, I develop a trio of approaches to explaining twisted self-deception: a motivation-centered approach; an emotion-centered approach; and a hybrid approach featuring both moti…Read more
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94Motivational strengthNoûs 32 (1): 23-36. 1998.It is often suggested that our desires vary in motivational strength or power. In a paper expressing skepticism about this idea, Irving Thalberg asked what he described, tongue in cheek, as "a disgracefully naive question" (1985, p. 88): "What do causal and any other theorists mean when they rate the strength of our PAs," that is, our "desires, aversions, preferences, schemes, and so forth"? His "guiding question" in the paper seems straightforward (p. 98): "What is it for our motivational state…Read more
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154Intentional action: Controversies, data, and core hypothesesPhilosophical Psychology 16 (2): 325-340. 2003.This article reviews some recent empirical work on lay judgments about what agents do intentionally and what they intend in various stories and explores its bearing on the philosophical project of providing a conceptual analysis of intentional action. The article is a case study of the potential bearing of empirical studies of a variety of folk concepts on philosophical efforts to analyze those concepts and vice versa. Topics examined include double effect; the influence of moral considerations …Read more
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79Approaching self-deception: How Robert Audi and I part companyConsciousness and Cognition 19 (3): 745-750. 2010.This article explores fundamental differences between Robert Audi’s position on self-deception and mine. Although we both depart from a model of self-deception that is straightforwardly based on stereotypical interpersonal deception, we differ in how we do that. An important difference between us might be partly explained by a difference in how we understand the kind of deceiving that is most relevant to self-deception.
Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |