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Personal ontology: mystery and its consequencesCambridge University Press. 2024.What are we? Are we, for example, souls, organisms, brains, or something else? In this book, Andrew Brenner argues that there are principled obstacles to our discovering the answer to this fundamental metaphysical question. The main competing accounts of personal ontology hold that we are either souls (or composites of soul and body), or we are composite physical objects of some sort, but, as Brenner shows, arguments for either of these options can be parodied and transformed into their opposite…Read more
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On Liberty and Cruelty: A Reply to Walter BlockStudia Humana 11 (1): 32-42. 2022.
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Political Conviction and Epistemic InjusticePhilosophia 49 (1): 197-216. 2020.Epistemic injustice occurs when we fail to appropriately respect others as epistemic agents. Philosophers building on the work of Miranda Fricker, who introduced the concept, have focused on epistemic injustices involving certain social categories, particularly race and gender. Can there be epistemic injustice attached to political conviction and affiliation? I argue yes: politics can be a salient social category that draws epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustices might also be intersectional, …Read more
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Does Ontology Matter?Disputatio 6 (38): 67-91. 2014.In this paper, I argue that various disputes in ontology have important ramifications and so are worth taking seriously. I employ a criterion according to which whether a dispute matters depends on how integrated it is with the rest of our theoretical projects. Disputes that arise from previous tensions in our theorizing and have additional implications for other issues matter, while insular disputes do not. I apply this criterion in arguing that certain ontological disputes matter; specifically…Read more
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Debunking Rationalist Defenses of Common-Sense Ontology: An Empirical ApproachReview of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1): 197-221. 2016.Debunking arguments typically attempt to show that a set of beliefs or other intensional mental states bear no appropriate explanatory connection to the facts they purport to be about. That is, a debunking argument will attempt to show that beliefs about p are not held because of the facts about p. Such beliefs, if true, would then only be accidentally so. Thus, their causal origins constitute an undermining defeater. Debunking arguments arise in various philosophical domains, targeting beliefs …Read more
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Why compositional nihilism dissolves puzzlesSynthese 197 (10): 4319-4340. 2020.One of the main motivations for compositional nihilism, the view that there are no composite material objects, concerns the many puzzles and problems associated with them. Nihilists claim that eliminating composites provides a unified solution to a slew of varied, difficult problems. However, numerous philosophers have questioned whether this is really so. While nihilists clearly avoid the usual, composite-featuring formulations of the puzzles, the concern is that the commitments that generate t…Read more
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The intelligibility of metaphysical structurePhilosophical Studies 176 (3): 581-606. 2019.Theories that posit metaphysical structure are able to do much work in philosophy. Some, however, find the notion of ‘metaphysical structure’ unintelligible. In this paper, I argue that their charge of unintelligibility fails. There is nothing distinctively problematic about the notion. At best, their charge of unintelligibility is a mere reiteration of previous complaints made toward similar notions. In developing their charge, I clarify several important concepts, including primitiveness, inte…Read more
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Hong Kong Baptist UniversityDepartment of Religion and Philosophy, Faculty of ArtsAssistant Professor
University of Notre Dame
PhD, 2016
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |