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656What is a mind?Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1): 183-205. 1994.My visual cortex at the back of my brain processes the stimulation to my eyes and then causes other parts of the brain - like the speech centre and the areas involved in thought and movement - to be properly responsive to vision. According to functionalism the whole mental character of vision - the whole of how things look - is fixed purely in the pattern of responses to vision and not in any of the initial processing of vision in the visual cortex. That this functionalist theory of vision is tr…Read more
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698A Justification of Empirical ThinkingPhilosophy Now 102 22-24. 2014.Imagine two urns, each with a thousand beads - in one all the beads are blue while in the other only one of the thousand is blue. If one of these urns is pushed forward (based on the toss of a fair coin) and the single bead then randomly drawn from it is blue, we must infer that it is a thousand times more probable that the urn pushed forward is the purely blue one. The hypothesis that this was instead the urn with only one blue bead would require that the occurrence of the evidence, the blue be…Read more
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852Thoughts about a solution to the mind-body problemThink 6 (17-18): 159-171. 2008.This challenging paper presents an ingenious argument for a functionalist theory of mind. Part of the argument: My visual cortex at the back of my brain processes the stimulation to my eyes and then causes other parts of the brain - like the speech centre and the areas involved in thought and movement - to be properly responsive to vision. According to functionalism the whole mental character of vision - the whole of how things look - is fixed purely in the pattern of responses to vision and not…Read more
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2570Nietzsche and Eternal RecurrenceIn Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays, . pp. 343-357. 1973.I critically examine Nietzsche’s argument in The Will to Power that all the detailed events of the world are repeating infinite times (on account of the merely finite possible arrangements of forces that constitute the world and the inevitability with which any arrangement of force must bring about its successors). Nietzsche celebrated this recurrence because of the power of belief in it to bring about a revaluation of values focused wholly on the value of one’s endlessly repeating life. Belief …Read more
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459Why Should I Care About Morality?Philosophy Now 31 24-27. 2001.For a while in this article it seems impossible to articulate a compelling reason for refraining from killing an innocent stranger with the press of a button when this would earn one a small prize and would be done with absolutely guaranteed immunity from any punishment or other harm (including even an instantaneous elimination of any chance of a guilty memory, achieved through hypnosis, and an ironclad commitment from God not to condemn the killing). After many failed attempts, a compelling rea…Read more
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584A Presentation without an Example?Analysis 52 (3). 1992.This article presents a paradox of inclusion, like Russell’s paradox but in a natural language.
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569The perspectival nature of probability and inferenceInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (3). 2000.It is argued that two observers with the same information may rightly disagree about the probability of an event that they are both observing. This is a correct way of describing the view of a lottery outcome from the perspective of a winner and from the perspective of an observer not connected with the winner - the outcome is improbable for the winner and not improbable for the unconnected observer. This claim is both argued for and extended by developing a case in which a probabilistic inferen…Read more
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660Theories that Refute ThemselvesPhilosophy Now (106): 16-18. 2015.Many philosophical positions wholly undermine themselves because to possess the truth that they claim for themselves they would have to be false. These are the theories that in one way or another reject the meaningfulness or attainability of objective truth.
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43Morality and Hot MudPhilosophy Now 37 39-40. 2002.For a while in this article it seems impossible to articulate a compelling reason for refraining from killing an innocent stranger with the press of a button when this would earn one a small prize and would be done with absolutely guaranteed immunity from any punishment or other harm (including even an instantaneous elimination of any chance of a guilty memory, achieved through hypnosis, and an ironclad commitment from God not to condemn the killing). After many failed attempts, a compelling rea…Read more
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3381The story of a brainIn Douglas R. Hofstadter & Daniel C. Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I, Basic Books. pp. 202-212. 1981.Most people will agree that if my brain were made to have within it precisely the same pattern of activity that is in it now but through artificial means, as in its being fed all its stimulation through electrodes as it sits in a vat, an experience would result for me that would be subjectively indistinguishable from that I am now having. In ‘The Story of a Brain’ I ask whether the same subjective experience would be maintained in variations like these: The hemispheres are in different vats but …Read more
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1229Morality as What One Really DesiresMidwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1): 142-164. 1995.If I desire to drink some stuff thinking it is hot chocolate when actually it is hot mud, my desire is not a real one - it’s mistaken or only apparent. This example illustrates how a desire must always depend on a belief about its object, a belief about what it is and what it’s like. But beliefs are correctable, so desires are correctable. This leads us directly to a very sweeping principle - that I only really desire what I would be desiring with a perfect grasp of everything involved. If there…Read more
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5299One self: The logic of experienceInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 33 (1): 39-68. 1990.Imagine that you and a duplicate of yourself are lying unconscious, next to each other, about to undergo a complete step-by-step exchange of bits of your bodies. It certainly seems that at no stage in this exchange of bits will you have thereby switched places with your duplicate. Yet it also seems that the end-result, with all the bits exchanged, will be essentially that of the two of you having switched places. Where will you awaken? I claim that one and the same person possesses both bodies, …Read more
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Normative Ethics |
Philosophy of Probability |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |