•  258
    Strawson's Metacritique
    In Sybren Heyndels, Audun Bengtson & Benjamin De Mesel (eds.), P.F. Strawson and his Philosophical Legacy, Oxford University Press. 2023.
    What is the status of the claims which make up Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason? This question seemed to Kant’s contemporaries to require a metacritique. Strawson’s criticisms of Kant should be understood in this context: as raising a metacritical challenge about Kant’s grounds for the claims which make up his arguments. What about the claims which make up Strawson’s own arguments in The Bounds of Sense? I argue in this chapter, against what I take to be the general consensus, tha…Read more
  •  617
    Kant on the Pure Forms of Sensibility
    In Andrew Stephenson & Anil Gomes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Kant, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Our aim in this chapter is to shed light on Kant’s account of the pure forms of sensibility by focusing on a somewhat neglected issue: Kant’s restriction of his claims about space and time to the case of human sensibility. Kant argues that space and time are the pure forms of sensibility for human cognizers. But he also says that we cannot know whether space and time are likewise the pure forms of sensibility for all discursive cognizers. A great deal of attention has focused on the first of the…Read more
  •  9
    Editorial
    Mind Current Issue 125 (500): 957-958. 2016.
    In their opening editorial the new Editors of MIND, Lucy O’Brien and Adrian Moore, explained that while the journal will continue to publish book reviews, their length will be increased and their number significantly reduced. The journal’s aim is ‘to include only book reviews that vie with articles in terms of their impact and potential for setting the agenda’. I am delighted to join the editorial team as Reviews Editor to help secure this goal. MIND has already begun the transition to commissio…Read more
  •  411
    The Analytic of Concepts
    In Mark Timmons & Sorin Baiasu (eds.), The Kantian Mind, Routledge. 2024.
    The aim of the Analytic of Concepts is to derive and deduce a set of pure concepts of the understanding, the categories, which play a central role in Kant’s explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition and judgment. This chapter is structured around two questions. First, what is a pure concept of the understanding? Second, what is involved in a deduction of a pure concept of the understanding? In answering the first, we focus on how the categories differ from the pure forms of …Read more
  •  253
    On Being Internally the Same
    In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Volume 1, Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Internalism and externalism disagree about whether agents who are internally the same can differ in their mental states. But what is it for two agents to be internally the same? Standard formulations take agents to be internally the same in virtue of some metaphysical fact, for example, that they share intrinsic physical properties. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that such formulations should be rejected. We provide the outlines of an alternative formulation on which agents are internally t…Read more
  •  714
    The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? What kinds of empirical models can be given of these operations? In what sense, and in what ways, are intui…Read more
  •  1212
    On the Necessity of the Categories
    Philosophical Review 131 (2). 2022.
    For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two sub-faculties: sensibility and the understanding. Each has pure forms which are necessary to us as humans: space and time for sensibility; the categories for the understanding. But Kant is careful to leave open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility. They would be finite rational beings and discursive cognizers. But they would not be human. A…Read more
  •  1271
    Anil Gomes considers Murdoch's view that morality is real and that, with the right conceptual resources, we can perceive it.
  •  1843
    Iris Murdoch: Moral Vision
    In Silvia Caprioglio Panizza & Mark Hopwood (eds.), Murdochian Mind, Routledge. 2022.
    In the essays which make up The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch gives us a picture of moral life in which ‘the metaphor of vision [is] almost irresistibly suggested’. This chapter aims to clarify the role played by the metaphor of vision in Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. I’ll examine two different things which might be meant by the term ‘moral vision’: vision of moral things or vision which is itself moral. The suggestion will be that whilst both capture something important about Murdoch’s …Read more
  •  456
    Unity and objectivity in Strawson and Cassam
    Analytic Philosophy 62 (1): 84-96. 2021.
    Some comments on Quassim Cassam’s Self and World written for a conference at the Institute of Philosophy in 2017. I consider the objection that Cassam raises to Strawson’s argument from unity to objectivity in The Bounds of Sense and raise some general questions about Cassam’s problem of misconception and its application to transcendental arguments.
  •  168
    Snapshot: P. F. Strawson
    The Philosophers' Magazine 84 48-53. 2019.
    P.F. Strawson (1919-2006) was one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth-century. His career centred around Oxford – first as Tutor and Fellow at University College, then as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College. His careful, thoughtful, and characteristically elegant written work was influential in moving Oxford philosophy from the anti-metaphysical leanings of A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin to a renewed and rejuvenated era of traditional philosophy theori…Read more
  •  798
    Kant on the Relation of Intuition to Cognition
    In Dennis Schulting (ed.), Kantian Nonconceptualism, Palgrave-macmillan. 2016.
    Recent debates in the interpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy have focused on the nature of Kantian intuition and, in particular, on the question of whether intuitions depend for their existence on the existence of their objects. In this paper we show how opposing answers to this question determine different accounts of the nature of Kantian cognition and we suggest that progress can be made on determining the nature of intuition by considering the implications different views have for t…Read more
  •  922
    Visual experiences seem to exhibit phenomenological particularity: when you look at some object, it – that particular object – looks some way to you. But experiences exhibit generality too: when you look at a distinct but qualitatively identical object, things seem the same to you as they did in seeing the first object. Naïve realist accounts of visual experience have often been thought to have a problem with each of these observations. It has been claimed that naïve realist views cannot account…Read more
  •  695
    Perception and reflection
    Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 131-152. 2017.
    What method should we use to determine the nature of perceptual experience? My focus here is the Kantian thought that transcendental arguments can be used to determine the nature of perceptual experience. I set out a dilemma for the use of transcendental arguments in the philosophy of perception, one which turns on a comparison ofthe transcendental method with the first-personal method of early analytic philosophy, and with the empirical m…Read more
  •  304
    Minding the Gap: Subjectivism and the Deduction
    Kantian Review 23 (1): 99-109. 2018.
    Chapter 4 of Dennis Schulting’s book Kant’s Radical Subjectivism targets those commentators who take there to be a gap in the transcendental deduction of the categories, arguing instead that there is no gap between the necessary application of the categories and their exemplification in the object of experience. In these comments on the chapter, I suggest a minimal sense in which the fact that there is a gap is non-negotiable. The interesting question is not whether there is a gap which ne…Read more
  •  1766
    XII—Is There a Problem of Other Minds?
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 111 (3pt3): 353-373. 2011.
    Scepticism is sometimes expressed about whether there is any interesting problem of other minds. In this paper I set out a version of the conceptual problem of other minds which turns on the way in which mental occurrences are presented to the subject and situate it in relation to debates about our knowledge of other people's mental lives. The result is a distinctive problem in the philosophy of mind concerning our relation to other people.
  •  3741
    In the first part of this chapter, I summarise some of the issues in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant’s Critical writings. In the second part, I chart some of the ways in which that discussion influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind and identify some of the themes which characterise Kantian approaches in the philosophy of mind.
  •  1107
    Perception, Evidence, and our Expressive Knowledge of Others' Minds.
    In Anita Avramides & Matthew Parrott (eds.), Knowing Other Minds, Oxford University Press. 2019.
    ‘How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?’ So asks Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. It is this question, rather than any concern about pretence or deception, which forms the basis for the philosophical problem of other minds. Responses to this problem have tended to cluster around two solutions: either we know others’ minds through perception; or we know others’ minds through a form of inference. In the first part of this pape…Read more
  •  683
    We are grateful to Ganson and Mehta (forthcoming) for their reply to our defence of phenomenal particularism against the objections raised by Mehta in his (2014). Their reply clarifies the nature of their objections to phenomenal particularism and helps identify the locus of our disagreements. In what follows we aim to defend phenomenal particularism against the objections raised in their reply.
  •  1935
    Testimony and Other Minds
    Erkenntnis 80 (1): 173-183. 2015.
    In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it
  •  2910
    James Van Cleve has argued that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the categories shows, at most, that we must apply the categories to experience. And this falls short of Kant’s aim, which is to show that they must so apply. In this discussion I argue that once we have noted the differences between the first and second editions of the Deduction, this objection is less telling. But Van Cleve’s objection can help illuminate the structure of the B Deduction, and it suggests an interesting reason wh…Read more
  •  1287
    Kant on Perception: Naive Realism, Non-Conceptualism, and the B-Deduction
    Philosophical Quarterly 64 (254): 1-19. 2014.
    According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a …Read more
  •  491
    Nonconceptualism, Hume’s Problem, and the Deduction
    Philosophical Studies 174 (7): 1687-1698. 2017.
    Lucy Allais seeks to provide a reading of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories which is compatible with a nonconceptualist account of Kant’s theory of intuition. According to her interpretation, the aim of the Deduction is to show that a priori concept application is required for empirical concept application. I argue that once we distinguish the application of the categories from the instantiation of the categories, we see that Allais’s reconstruction of the Deduction cannot provide a…Read more
  •  912
    Unity, Objectivity, and the Passivity of Experience
    European Journal of Philosophy 24 (3): 946-969. 2016.
    In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences if we …Read more
  •  1025
    Kant and the Explanatory Role of Experience
    Kant Studien 104 (3): 277-300. 2013.
    We are able to think of empirical objects as capable of existing unperceived. What explains our grasp of this conception of objects? In this paper I examine the claim that experience explains our understanding of objects as capable of existing unperceived with reference to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I argue that standard accounts of experience’s explanatory role are unsatisfactory, but that an alternative account can be extracted from the first Critique – one which relies on Kant’s transcen…Read more
  •  643
    In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott, we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than to…Read more
  •  777
    Other minds and perceived identity
    Dialectica 63 (2): 219-230. 2009.
    Quassim Cassam has recently defended a perceptual model of knowledge of other minds: one on which we can see and thereby know that another thinks and feels. In the course of defending this model, he addresses issues about our ability to think about other minds. I argue that his solution to this 'conceptual problem' does not work. A solution to the conceptual problem is necessary if we wish to explain knowledge of other minds.
  •  463
    Epicurean aspects of mental state attributions
    Philosophical Psychology 28 (7): 1001-1011. 2015.
    In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people judge patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mental capacity than the dead. They explain this result by claiming that people have implicit dualist or afterlife beliefs. This essay critically evaluates their experimental findings and their proposed explanation. We argue first that the experiments do not support the conclusion that people intuitively think PVS patients have l…Read more