•  1064
    Empiricism, Time-Awareness, and Hume's Manners of Disposition
    Journal of Scottish Philosophy 5 (1): 47-63. 2007.
    The issue of time-awareness presents a critical challenge for empiricism: if temporal properties are not directly perceived, how do we become aware of them? A unique empiricist account of time-awareness suggested by Hume's comments on time in the Treatise avoids the problems characteristic of other empiricist accounts. Hume's theory, however, has some counter-intuitive consequences. The failure of empiricists to come up with a defensible theory of time-awareness lends prima facie support to a no…Read more
  •  989
    Performative transcendental arguments
    Philosophia 33 (1-4): 69-95. 2005.
      ‘Performative’ transcendental arguments exploit the status of a subcategory of self-falsifying propositions in showing that some form of skepticism is unsustainable. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between performatively inconsistent propositions and transcendental arguments, and then to compare performative transcendental arguments to modest transcendental arguments that seek only to establish the indispensability of some belief or conceptual framework. Reconceptualizing …Read more
  •  773
    Time-awareness and projection in Mellor and Kant
    Kant Studien 101 (1): 59-74. 2010.
    The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Ka…Read more
  •  760
    Kant and the Conventionality of Simultaneity
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (5): 845-856. 2010.
    Kant’s three Analogies of Experience, in his Critique of Pure Reason, represent a highly condensed attempt to establish the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics. His strategy is to show that the organization of experience in terms of a world of enduring substances undergoing mutual causal interaction is a necessary condition of the temporal ordering even of one’s own subjective states, and thus of coherent experience itself. In his Third Analogy—an examination of the necessary condition…Read more
  •  167
    The Aristotelian Prescription: Skepticism, Retortion, and Transcendental Arguments
    International Philosophical Quarterly 46 (3): 263-276. 2006.
    From a number of quarters have come attempts to answer some form of skepticism—about knowledge of the external world, freedom of the will, or moral reasons—by showing it to be performatively self-defeating. Examples of this strategy are subject to a number of criticisms, in particular the criticism that they fail to shift the burden of proof from the anti-skeptical position, and so fail to establish the epistemic entitlement they seek. To these approaches I contrast one way of understanding Kant…Read more
  •  113
    Kant's empiricism in his refutation of idealism
    Kantian Review 8 62-88. 2004.
    In the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant laments thatit still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us … must be accepted on faith, and if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof. The two editions of the Critique each contain a celebrated refutation of epistemological scepticisms like those of Descartes and Hume. The first edition refut…Read more
  •  107
    In this essay I address the question of the reality of temporal passage through a discussion of some of the implications of Kant's reasoning concerning the necessary conditions of objective judgement. Some theorists have claimed that the attribution of non‐relational temporal properties to objects and events represents a conceptual confusion, or ‘category mistake’. By means of an examination of Kant's Second Analogy, and a comparison between that argument and Cassam's recent exploration of an ar…Read more
  •  98
    From Nozick to welfare rights: Self‐ownership, property, and moral desert
    Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 14 (4): 481-501. 2000.
    The Kantian moral foundations of Nozickian libertarianism suggest that the claim that self‐ownership grounds only negative rights to property should be rejected. The moral foundations of Nozick's libertarianism better support basing property rights on moral desert. It is neither incoherent nor implausible to say that need can be a basis for desert. By implication, the libertarian contention that persons ought to be respected as persons living self‐shaping lives is inconsistent with the libertari…Read more
  •  83
    Reliabilism, proper function, and serendipitous malfunction
    Philosophical Investigations 30 (1). 2006.
    Alvin Plantinga's externalist analysis of epistemic warrant centres on the proper function of the relevant belief-forming mechanism, where proper function is fixed relative to the design plan of the organism in question. He has set this analysis against reliabilism, the other leading externalist contender for the analysis of warrant. Though Plantinga's discussion advances the field of epistemology in a number of important ways, his treatment of warrant is limited by his assumption of creationism…Read more
  •  47
    Ethics education and value prioritization among members of U.s. Hospital ethics committees
    Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 14 (4): 395-406. 2004.
    : Calls for ethics education for members of hospital ethics committees presume that the effects and benefits of such education are well-established. This is not the case. A review of the literature reveals that studies consistently have failed to uncover any significant effect of ethics education on the moral reasoning, moral competency, and/or moral development of medical professionals. The present paper discusses this negative result and describes the author's national study of the value prior…Read more
  •  43
    Leibniz on the Epistemic Status of the Mysteries
    Philosophy and Theology 13 (1): 143-158. 2001.
    In this paper, I examine Leibniz’s account of the epistemic status of the Christian Mysteries in his “Preliminary Dissertation on the Conformity of Faith with Reason.” In it, the Mysteries are held to be true, yet also to be beyond human comprehension. This conjunction gives rise to a dilemma: how can the Mysteries bemeaningfully asserted if they are unintelligible? To answer this, Leibniz compares them to natural truths, which are demonstrable by God alone. To complicate matters, however, he su…Read more
  •  42
    Transcendental Arguments and Kant's Refutation of Idealism
    Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 1999.
    An anti-skeptical transcendental argument can be loosely defined as an argument that purports to show that some experience or knowledge of an external world is a necessary condition of our possession of some knowledge, concept, or cognitive ability that we know we have. In this dissertation I examine transcendental arguments by focusing on one such argument given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, along with some attempts to interpret that argument by contemporary commentators. ;I …Read more
  •  39
    A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time
    Oxford University Press. 2013.
    A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time is a concise and accessible survey of the history of philosophical and scientific developments in understanding time and our experience of time. It discusses prominent ideas about the nature of time, plus many subsidiary puzzles about time, from the classical period through the present
  •  37
    This volume is a wide-ranging examination of denial and ideological denialism. It offers a readable overview of the psychology and social science of bias, self-deception, and denial, and examines the role of ideological denialism in conflicts over science and public policy, politics, and culture.
  •  32
    The empiricist needs to explain the origin, in perception, of the idea of time. Kant believed the only answer was a kind of idealism about time. This essay examines Hume’s extensionalism as a possible answer to Kant. Extensionalism allegedly accounts for the experience of time via the manner of presentation of experiences, rather than the content of experience.
  •  31
    Descartes, Unknown Faculties, and Incurable Doubt
    Idealistic Studies 28 (1-2): 83-100. 1998.
  •  23
    The Passage of Time is Not an Illusion: It's a Projection
    Philosophy 98 (4): 485-506. 2023.
    This essay aims to review and clarify an emerging consensus among philosophers of time: that belief in the passage of time is not a matter of illusion but rather the result of a variety of cognitive error. I argue that this error is best described in terms of psychological projection, properly understood. A close analysis of varieties of projection reveals how well this phenomenon accounts for belief in dynamic temporal passage and the objective becoming of events. A projectivist account of beli…Read more
  •  22
    Introduction
    Synthese 152 (3): 299-300. 2006.
  •  20
    The Future of the Philosophy of Time (edited book)
    Routledge. 2011.
    The last century has seen enormous progress in our understanding of time. This volume features original essays by the foremost philosophers of time discussing the goals and methodology of the philosophy of time, and examining the best way to move forward with regard to the field's core issues. The collection is unique in combining cutting edge work on time with a focus on the big picture of time studies as a discipline. The major questions asked include: What are the implications of relativity a…Read more
  •  19
    Temporal Passage and Kant's Second Analogy
    Ratio 15 (2): 134-153. 2003.
    In this essay I address the question of the reality of temporal passage through a discussion of some of the implications of Kant's reasoning concerning the necessary conditions of objective judgement. Some theorists have claimed that the attribution of non‐relational temporal properties to objects and events represents a conceptual confusion, or ‘category mistake’. By means of an examination of Kant's Second Analogy, and a comparison between that argument and Cassam's recent exploration of an ar…Read more
  •  19
    This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its…Read more
  •  15
    Rehabilitating Kant’s Third Analogy of Experience
    International Philosophical Quarterly 61 (4): 397-407. 2021.
    In this essay I revisit Kant’s largely-ignored Third Analogy of Experience with an eye to what it may yet contribute to our understanding of time perception. The essay begins with an elucidation of the purpose of the Third Analogy, followed by an account of how the core argument is intended to work. It then summarizes the problem that has left the Third Analogy out of much of the scholarly literature on Kant. I respond by introducing two ways of scaling back on Kant’s claims. First, I offer a re…Read more
  •  9
    A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (edited book)
    with Adrian Bardon and Heather Dyke
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
  •  8
    Rehabilitating Kant’s Third Analogy of Experience in advance
    International Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
  •  6
    Parmenides' Refutation of Change
    In Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011.