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Three challenges of early-career faculty and the importance of self-careIn Noran L. Moffett (ed.), Navigating post-doctoral career placement, research, and professionalism, Information Science Reference. 2021.
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Problematizing the Profession of Teaching from an Existential Perspective. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing (edited book)Information Age Publishing. 2022.
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7Problematizing the Profession of Teaching from an Existential Perspective (edited book)Information Age Publishing. 2022.Teachers not only serve as caretakers for the students in their classroom but also serve as stewards for society's next generation. In this way, teachers are charged with responsibility for the present and the future of their world. Shouldering this responsibility is no less than an existential dilemma that requires not only professional solutions but also personal responsibility rooted in subjective authenticity. In the edited volume, authors will explore how the philosophy of Existentialism ca…Read more
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39On Believing: Being Right in a World of PossibilitiesHunter, David, On Believing: Being Right in a World of Possibilities, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. xi + 244, UD$70 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102 (1): 240-242. 2024.There was a brief interval, around the turn of the century, when philosophers of mind had converged around a bio-psycho-functionalist account of our ‘propositional attitudes’. Our beliefs and desir...
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18Bain's Theory of Moral Judgment and the Development of Mill's UtilitarianismUtilitas 34 (4): 409-427. 2022.InUtilitarianism, Mill defers to Alexander Bain's expertise on the subject of moral judgment to answer common criticisms of the creed. First, we do not blame people or label them immoral when they are less than ideal. Judgments of immorality are commonly reserved for substandard behavior, not suboptimal comportment. Second, we do not commonly insist on full neutrality in benevolence. Indeed, some philosophers argue that we are obliged to exhibit partiality, insofar as it is demanded by our roles…Read more
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19Bain's Theory of Belief and the Genesis of PragmatismTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 57 (3): 319-340. 2022.ARRAY
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1"Hume's Reasons"Hume Studies 2 (33): 211-256. 2007.Hume's claim that reason is a slave to the passions involves both a causal thesis: reason cannot cause action without the aid of the passions, and an evaluative thesis: it is improper to evaluate our actions in terms of their reasonableness. On my reading, Hume motivates his causal thesis by arguing that accurate representation is the function of reason, where a faculty of this kind cannot produce action on its own. (The interpretation helps vindicate Hume of the common charge that he "begs the …Read more
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33In defense of a pragmatic picture of beliefPhilosophical Studies 177 (2): 449-457. 2020.In Belief: A Pragmatic Picture, I define “belief” as information poised to guide relatively attentive, controlled action. Though I admit that this is one of several definitions compatible with science and common speech, I mount a pragmatic argument for its adoption as the best means for structuring egalitarian social relations. I here further explicate and defend the pragmatic view of belief in response to my critics.
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65Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2018.The Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology brings together philosophers, cognitive scientists, developmental and evolutionary psychologists, animal ethologists, intellectual historians, and educators to provide the most comprehensive analysis of the prospects for moral knowledge ever assembled in print. The book’s thirty chapters feature leading experts describing the nature of moral thought, its evolution, childhood development, and neurological realization. Various forms of moral skepticism …Read more
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Directly in Mind: An Account of First Person AccessDissertation, Cornell University. 2002.The proximity of introspection makes it difficult to explain. In what does our knowledge of our own beliefs and desires consist? Do we observe them with an inner eye? Do we infer their existence from premises concerning our actions and feelings? I reject both of these suggestions. Instead, I defend the view that facts about what we believe, and certain facts about what we want, are known by us in a direct or unmediated fashion. When one has genuinely introspective knowledge of a belief one's rea…Read more
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48A Conflict in Common-Sense Moral PsychologyUtilitas 21 (4): 401-423. 2009.Ordinary thinking about morality and rationality is inconsistent. To arrive at a view of morality that is as faithful to common thought as consistency will allow we must admit that it is not always irrational to knowingly act against the weight of reasons.
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30Belief and Commitment: Commentary on Annalisa Coliva, The Varieties of Self-Knowledge, London: Pallgrave MacmillanPhilosophia 47 (2): 335-342. 2019.
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178Basic Self-Knowledge: Answering Peacocke’s Criticisms of ConstitutivismPhilosophical Studies 128 (2): 337-379. 2006.Constitutivist accounts of self-knowledge argue that a noncontingent, conceptual relation holds between our first-order mental states and our introspective awareness of them. I explicate a constitutivist account of our knowledge of our own beliefs and defend it against criticisms recently raised by Christopher Peacocke. According to Peacocke, constitutivism says that our second-order introspective beliefs are groundless. I show that Peacocke’s arguments apply to reliabilism not to constitutivism…Read more
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734[1] If only Boghossian’s eminently reasonable book were required reading for every freshman considering entrance into the humanities—the next generation of lay-people would be saved from the uncomprehending repetition of relativist slogans, and future scholars would be kept from mounting baroque, ineffectual attempts at their defense. Fear of Knowledge is engaging, easy to read, and hard to dispute. It’s a satisfying work for those in the choir who will enjoy seeing written on the page precisely …Read more
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45Belief: A Pragmatic PictureOxford University Press. 2018.Aaron Zimmerman presents a new pragmatist account of belief, in terms of information poised to guide our more attentive, controlled actions. And he explores the consequences of this account for our understanding of the relation between psychology and philosophy, the mind and brain, the nature of delusion, faith, pretence, racism, and more.
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48Review of Jennifer Lackey, Learning From Words: Testimony As a Source of Knowledge (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (7). 2008.
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333Self-knowledge: Rationalism vs. empiricismPhilosophy Compass 3 (2). 2008.Recent philosophical discussions of self-knowledge have focused on basic cases: our knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs, sensations, experiences, preferences, and intentions. Empiricists argue that we acquire this sort of self-knowledge through inner perception; rationalists assign basic self-knowledge an even more secure source in reason and conceptual understanding. I try to split the difference. Although our knowledge of our own beliefs and thoughts is conceptually insured, our knowledge o…Read more
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170Hume’s ReasonsHume Studies 33 (2): 211-256. 2007.Hume's claim that reason is a slave to the passions involves both a causal thesis: reason cannot cause action without the aid of the passions, and an evaluative thesis: it is improper to evaluate our actions in terms of their reasonableness. On my reading, Hume motivates his causal thesis by arguing that accurate representation is the function of reason, where a faculty of this kind cannot produce action on its own. (The interpretation helps vindicate Hume of the common charge that he "begs the …Read more
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77Self-verification and the content of thoughtSynthese 149 (1). 2006.Descartes famously argued, on purely conceptual grounds, that even an extremely powerful being could not trick him into mistakenly judging that he was thinking. Of course, it is not necessarily true that Descartes is thinking. Still, Descartes claimed, it is necessarily true that if a person judges that she is thinking, that person is thinking. Following Tyler Burge (1988) we call such judgments ‘self-verifying.’ More exactly, a judgment j performed by a subject S at a time t is selfverifying if…Read more
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312The nature of beliefJournal of Consciousness Studies 14 (11): 61-82. 2007.Neo-Cartesian approaches to belief place greater evidential weight on a subject's introspective judgments than do neo-behaviorist accounts. As a result, the two views differ on whether our absent-minded and weak-willed actions are guided by belief. I argue that simulationist accounts of the concept of belief are committed to neo-Cartesianism, and, though the conceptual and empirical issues that arise are inextricably intertwined, I discuss experimental results that should point theory-theorists …Read more
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59Putting extrospection to restPhilosophical Quarterly 55 (221): 658-661. 2005.Jordi Fernández has recently responded to my objection that his 'extrospectionist' account of self-knowledge posits necessary and sufficient conditions for introspective justification which are neither necessary nor sufficient. I show that my criticisms survive his response unscathed.
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712Against relativism (review)Philosophical Studies 133 (3): 313-348. 2007.Recent years have brought relativistic accounts of knowledge, first-person belief, and future contingents to prominence. I discuss these views, distinguish non-trivial from trivial forms of relativism, and then argue against relativism in all of its substantive varieties.
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58Unnatural AccessPhilosophical Quarterly 54 (216): 435-38. 2004.Jordi Fernandez has recently offered an interesting account of introspective justification according to which the very states that (subjectively) justify one's first-order belief that p justify one's second order belief that one believes that p. I provide two objections to Fernandez's account.
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168Self-verification and the content of thoughtSynthese 149 (1): 59-75. 2006.Burge follows Descartes in claiming that the category of conceptually self-verifying judgments includes (but is not restricted to) judgments that give rise to sincere assertions of sentences of the form, 'I am thinking that p'. In this paper I argue that Burge’s Cartesian insight is hard to reconcile with Fregean accounts of the content of thought. Burge's intuitively compelling claim that cogito judgments are conceptually self-verifying poses a real challenge to neo-Fregean theories of content.
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1125Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions: An Empirical StudyReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (2). 2010.In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these bank cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer seems to make in his critique of Stanley. We argue that our data impugn what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our intuitions about…Read more
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Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, by Paul Boghossian (review)Ars Disputandi 7. 2007.
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