University of Chicago
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2000
New York City, New York, United States of America
  •  894
    Post-physicalism
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2): 61-80. 2001.
    I am going to argue that it is time to come to terms with the difficulty of understanding what it means to be physical and start thinking about the mind-body problem from a new perspective. Instead of construing it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally physical world, we should think of it as the problem of finding a place for mentality in a fundamentally nonmental world, a world that is at its most fundamental level entirely nonmental. The mind-body problem, I want …Read more
  •  741
    The body problem
    Noûs 33 (2): 183-200. 1999.
  •  209
    The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of …Read more
  •  202
    Physicalism in an infinitely decomposable world
    Erkentnis 64 (2): 177-191. 2006.
    Might the world be structured, as Leibniz thought, so that every part of matter is divided ad infinitum? The Physicist David Bohm accepted infinitely decomposable matter, and even Steven Weinberg, a staunch supporter of the idea that science is converging on a final theory, admits the possibility of an endless chain of ever more fundamental theories. However, if there is no fundamental level, physicalism, thought of as the view that everything is determined by fundamental phenomena and that all …Read more
  •  185
    What is the physical
    In Ansgar Beckermann & Brian P. McLaughlin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. 2005.
  •  178
    Physicalism could be true even if Mary learns something new
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (227): 176-189. 2007.
    Mary knows all there is to know about physics, chemistry and neurophysiology, yet has never experienced colour. Most philosophers think that if Mary learns something genuinely new upon seeing colour for the first time, then physicalism is false. I argue, however, that physicalism is consistent with Mary's acquisition of new information. Indeed, even if she has perfect powers of deduction, and higher-level physical facts are a priori deducible from lower-level ones, Mary may still lack concepts w…Read more
  •  169
    Proprioception as an aesthetic sense
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2): 231-242. 2006.
  •  165
    Does bodily awareness interfere with highly skilled movement?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (2). 2010.
    It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere with well-de…Read more
  •  163
    A Russellian Response to the Structural Argument Against Physicalism
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 17 (3-4): 70-83. 2010.
    According to David Chalmers , 'we have good reason to suppose that consciousness has a fundamental place in nature' . This, he thinks is because the world as revealed to us by fundamental physics is entirely structural -- it is a world not of things, but of relations -- yet relations can only account for more relations, and consciousness is not merely a relation . Call this the 'structural argument against physicalism.' I shall argue that there is a view about the relationship between mind and b…Read more
  •  159
    The Epistemic/Ontic Divide
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2): 404-418. 2003.
    A number of philosophers think that, while we cannot explain how the mind is physical, we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. That is, they accept both the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical and ontological physicalism. I argue that this position is unstable. Among other things, I argue that once one accepts the explanatory gap, the main argument for ontological physicalism, the argument from causation, looses its force. For if one takes physicaVnonphysical causation and …Read more
  •  150
    Varieties of causal closure
    In Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation, Imprint Academic. pp. 173-187. 2003.
  •  135
    Utilitarianism in Infinite Worlds
    Utilitas 12 (1): 91. 2000.
    Recently in the philosophical literature there has been some effort made to understand the proper application of the theory of utilitarianism to worlds in which there are infinitely many bearers of utility. Here, we point out that one of the best, most inclusive principles proposed to date contradicts fundamental utilitarian ideas, such as the idea that adding more utility makes a better world
  •  128
    Proprioceiving someone else's movement
    Philosophical Explorations 9 (2). 2006.
    Proprioception - the sense by which we come to know the positions and movements of our bodies - is thought to be necessarily confined to the body of the perceiver. That is, it is thought that while proprioception can inform you as to whether your left knee is bent or straight, it cannot inform you as to whether someone else's knee is bent or straight. But while proprioception certainly provides us with information about the positions and movements of our own bodies, I will argue that it does mor…Read more
  •  121
    Practice makes perfect: the effect of dance training on the aesthetic judge
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (1): 59-68. 2012.
    According to Hume, experience in observing art is one of the prerequisites for being an ideal art critic. But although Hume extols the value of observing art for the art critic, he says little about the value, for the art critic, of executing art. That is, he does not discuss whether ideal aesthetic judges should have practiced creating the form of art they are judging. In this paper, I address this issue. Contrary to some contemporary philosophers who claim that experience in creating art is ir…Read more
  •  120
    Consciousness Is Puzzling, but Not Paradoxical (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1): 213-226. 2004.
    In Purple Haze: the Puzzle of Consciousness, Joseph Levine tells us that the mind-body problem
  •  116
    Intuitions without concepts lose the game: mindedness in the art of chess (review)
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (2): 175-194. 2011.
    To gain insight into human nature philosophers often discuss the inferior performance that results from deficits such as blindsight or amnesia. Less often do they look at superior abilities. A notable exception is Herbert Dreyfus who has developed a theory of expertise according to which expert action generally proceeds automatically and unreflectively. We address one of Dreyfus’s primary examples of expertise: chess. At first glance, chess would seem an obvious counterexample to Dreyfus’s view …Read more
  •  106
    Chess and the conscious mind: Why Dreyfus and McDowell got it wrong
    Mind and Language 34 (3): 376-392. 2018.
    Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 376-392, June 2019.
  •  93
    With infinite utility, more needn't be better
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (2). 2000.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  84
    Affective Proprioception
    with Jonathan Cole
    Janus Head 9 (2): 299-317. 2007.
    Proprioception has been considered, within neuroscience, in the context of the control of movement. Here we discuss a possible second role for this 'sixth sense', pleasure in and of movement,homologous with the recently described affective touch. We speculate on its evolution and place in human society and suggest that pleasure in movement may depend not on feedback but also on harmony between intention and action. Examples come from expert movers, dancers and sportsmen, and from those without p…Read more
  •  80
    Considering the role of cognitive control in expert performance
    with John Toner and Aidan Moran
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (4): 1127-1144. 2015.
    Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ influential phenomenological analysis of skill acquisition proposes that expert performance is guided by non-cognitive responses which are fast, effortless and apparently intuitive in nature. Although this model has been criticised for over-emphasising the role that intuition plays in facilitating skilled performance, it does recognise that on occasions a form of ‘detached deliberative rationality’ may be used by experts to improve their performance. However, Dreyfus and Dre…Read more
  •  68
    New inconsistencies in infinite utilitarianism: Is every world good, bad or neutral?
    with Donniell Fishkind and Joel David Hamkins
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (2). 2002.
    In the context of worlds with infinitely many bearers of utility, we argue that several collections of natural Utilitarian principles--principles which are certainly true in the classical finite Utilitarian context and which any Utilitarian would find appealing--are inconsistent.
  •  66
    Effortless Bodily Movement
    Philosophical Topics 39 (1): 67-79. 2011.
    What is it for a bodily movement to be effortless? What are we appreciating when we admire a dancer’s effortless leaps, a basketball player’s effortless shot, or even a seagull’s effortless soar? I propose to explore the notion of effortlessness by distinguishing various kinds of effortless bodily movements, examining the idea that effortless movements are smooth, predictable ones, discussing the relations between effortlessness and difficulty and effortlessness and actual ease, and speculating …Read more
  •  63
    Irreverent Physicalism
    Philosophical Topics 40 (2): 91-102. 2012.
    Imagine that our world were such that the entities, properties, laws, and relations of fundamental physics did not determine what goes on at the mental level; imagine that duplicating our fundamental physics would fail to duplicate the pleasures, feelings of joy, and experiences of wonder that we know and love; in other words, imagine that the mental realm did not supervene on the physical realm. Would our world, then, be a world in which physicalism is false? A good number of philosophers who p…Read more
  •  57
    Physicalism is thought to entail that mental properties supervene on microphysical properties, or in other words that all God had to do was to create the fundamental physical properties and the rest came along for free. In this paper, we question the all-god-had-to-do reflex.
  •  57
    Many mathematicians are platonists: they believe that the axioms of mathematics are true because they express the structure of a nonspatiotemporal, mind independent, realm. But platonism is plagued by a philosophical worry: it is unclear how we could have knowledge of an abstract, realm, unclear how nonspatiotemporal objects could causally affect our spatiotemporal cognitive faculties. Here I aim to make room in our metaphysical picture of the world for the causal relevance of abstracta.
  •  57
    Really taking metaphysics seriously
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (5): 632-633. 2004.
    Ross & Spurrett (R&S) fail to take metaphysics seriously because they do not make a clear enough distinction between how we understand the world and what the world is really like. Although they show that the behavioral and cognitive sciences are genuinely explanatory, it is not clear that they have shown that these special sciences identify properties that are genuinely causal.
  •  52
    What Experience Doesn't Teach: Pain Amnesia and a New Paradigm for Memory Research
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (11-12): 102-125. 2020.
    Do we remember what pain feels like? Investigations into this question have sometimes led to ambiguous or apparently contradictory results. Building on research on pain memory by Rohini Terry and colleagues, I argue that this lack of agreement may be due in part to the difficulty researchers face when trying to convey to their study's participants the type of memory they are being tasked with recalling. To address this difficulty, I introduce the concept of 'qualitative memory', which, arguably,…Read more