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23The Descent of CultureBritish Journal of Aesthetics 54 (4): 489-492. 2014.Stephen Davies’ book shows admirable sensitivity to the complexities of aesthetic appreciation, the making of art, and evolutionary explanation. Our critical comments focus on his understanding of how the natural and the cultural are to be distinguished. We suggest that recent work on the evolution of cognition undermines any strict distinction between that which is learned, and therefore within the domain of culture or technology, and that which is part of human nature, and therefore within the…Read more
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200How to be a type-C physicalistPhilosophical Studies 164 (2): 301-320. 2013.This paper advances a version of physicalism which reconciles the “a priori entailment thesis” (APET) with the analytic independence of our phenomenal and physical vocabularies. The APET is the claim that, if physicalism is true, the complete truths of physics imply every other truth a priori. If so, “cosmic hermeneutics” is possible: a demon having only complete knowledge of physics could deduce every truth about the world. Analytic independence is a popular physicalist explanation for the appa…Read more
London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |