•  75
    "How to Think Several Thoughts at Once: Content Plurality in Mental Action"
    In Michael Brent & Lisa Miracchi Titus (eds.), Mental Action and the Conscious Mind, Routledge. pp. 31-60. 2023.
    Basic actions are those intentional actions performed not by doing any other kind of thing intentionally. Complex actions involve doing one kind of thing intentionally by doing another kind of thing intentionally. There are both basic and complex mental actions. Some complex mental actions have a striking feature that has not been previously discussed: they have several distinct contents at once. This chapter introduces and explains this feature, here called “content plurality.” This chapter als…Read more
  •  110
    How to judge intentionally
    Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1): 330-339. 2023.
    Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means by which you can perform such an intentional action. This model of intentional judgment does not …Read more
  •  119
    What Makes Value Aesthetic?
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (1): 94-95. 2023.
    Aesthetic value is not as peculiar as we might think. We do not walk into museums expecting to find there a good so refined that it bears no continuity with the.
  •  479
    Phenomenal experience and the aesthetics of agency
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 48 (3): 380-391. 2021.
    In his fascinating new book Games: Agency as Art, Nguyen endorses an experiential requirement on aesthetic judgment: apt aesthetic judgment requires phenomenal experience. His own aesthetics of agency captures three phenomenally manifest and aesthetically significant harmonies (and corresponding disharmonies). But his view can be significantly extended to capture much more of the rich texture of human agency. In this discussion, I argue that emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and afforda…Read more
  •  688
    Mental action
    Philosophy Compass 16 (6). 2021.
    Just as bodily actions are things you do with your body, mental actions are things you do with your mind. Both are different from things that merely happen to you. Where does the idea of mental action come from? What are mental actions? And why do they matter in philosophy? These are the three main questions answered in this paper. Section 1 introduces mental action through a brief history of the topic in philosophy. Section 2 explains what it is to be a mental action in terms of intentional a…Read more
  •  680
    Let’s be Liberal: An Alternative to Aesthetic Hedonism
    British Journal of Aesthetics 61 (2): 163-183. 2021.
    Aesthetic value empiricism claims that the aesthetic value of an object is grounded in the value of a certain kind of experience of it. The most popular version of value empiricism, and a dominant view in contemporary philosophical aesthetics more generally, is aesthetic hedonism. Hedonism restricts the grounds of aesthetic value to the pleasure enjoyed in the right kind of experience. But hedonism does not enjoy any clear advantage over a more permissive alternative version of value empiricism.…Read more
  •  619
    Embedded mental action in self-attribution of belief
    Philosophical Studies 174 (2): 353-377. 2017.
    You can come to know that you believe that p partly by reflecting on whether p and then judging that p. Call this procedure “the transparency method for belief.” How exactly does the transparency method generate known self-attributions of belief? To answer that question, we cannot interpret the transparency method as involving a transition between the contents p and I believe that p. It is hard to see how some such transition could be warranted. Instead, in this context, one mental action is bot…Read more
  •  2668
    How literature expands your imagination
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2): 298-319. 2020.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.