•  446
    Intentionality and the non-psychological
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (4): 531-54. 1986.
    IT IS SHOWN IN DETAIL THAT RECENT ACCOUNTS FAIL TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INTENTIONALITY AND MERELY CAUSALLY DISPOSITIONAL STATES OF INORGANIC PHYSICAL OBJECTS—A QUICK ROAD TO PANPSYCHISM. THE CLEAR NEED TO MAKE SUCH A DISTINCTION GIVES DIRECTION FOR FUTURE WORK. A BEGINNING IS MADE TOWARD PROVIDING SUCH AN ACCOUNT.
  •  6
    Dispositions: A Debate (edited book)
    with D. Armstrong and U. T. Place
    Routledge. 1996.
    'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive account…Read more
  •  36
    ABBA: An Educational Appreciation
    with Jannie P. H. Pretorius, D. Stephan du Toit, and Glynnis Daries
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 47 (1): 72-103. 2013.
    Jannie Pretorius and Michael Von Maltitz have identified some of the most pressing problems in South African education.1 They have argued that the education system is still suffering from the fragmented effects of apartheid and that the postapartheid government is struggling to set schools in motion to provide learners with authentic perspectives on the realities of their existence in a postapartheid South Africa. Naledi Pandor, the country's previous minister of education, painted a rather somb…Read more
  •  13
    Dispositions: A Debate
    with Tim Crane and D. M. Armstrong
    Routledge. 1996.
    Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. Dispositions: A Debate is an extended dialogue between three distinguished philosophers - D.M. Armstrong, C.B. Martin and U.T. Place - on the many problems associated with dispositions, which reveals their own distinctive accounts of the nature of dispositions. These are then linked to other issues such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation
  •  111
    The Need for Ontology: Some Choices
    Philosophy 68 (266): 505-522. 1993.
    The aim of this paper is to set out some of the ontologies amongst which some forms of anti-realism must select. This provides the appropriate setting for presenting an alternative realist ontology. The argument is that the choice between the varieties of anti-realism and realism is inevitably a choice between ontologies.
  •  422
    The ontological turn
    with John Heil
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23 (1). 1999.
  •  38
    Rules and Powers
    with John Heil
    Noûs 32 (S12): 283-312. 1998.
  •  107
    Proto-language
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65 (3). 1987.
    No abstract
  •  200
    The development of a compositional model shows the incoherence of such notions as levels of being and both bottom-up and top-down causality. The mathematization of nature through the partial considerations of physics qua quantities is seen to lead to Pythagoreanism, if what is not included in the partial consideration is denied. An ontology of only probabilities, if not Pythagoreanism, is equivalent to a world of primitive dispositionalities. Problems are found with each. There is a need for pro…Read more
  •  260
    How it is: Entities, absences and voids
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1). 1996.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  406
    Dispositions and conditionals
    Philosophical Quarterly 44 (174): 1-8. 1994.
  •  85
    The Mind in Nature
    Oxford University Press. 2007.
    What are the most fundamental features of the world? Do minds stand outside the natural order? Is a unified picture of mental and physical reality possible? The Mind in Nature provides a staunchly realist account of the world as a unified system incorporating both the mental and the physical.
  •  3
    Nowadays, the high-temperature plasticity of yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystals is successfully explained in terms of a threshold stress. Despite the fact that its existence is very well proved experimentally, the origin and nature of the threshold stress are still unexplained. This work develops a possible explanation for the threshold stress in YTZPs. The model developed in this paper is able to explain quantitatively the dependence of this threshold stress with temperature and…Read more
  •  25
    Contexts and the Concept of Mild Context-Sensitivity
    with M. Kudlek, A. Mateescu, and V. Mitrana
    Linguistics and Philosophy 26 (6). 2003.
    We introduce and study a natural extension of Marcus external contextual grammars. This mathematically simple mechanism which generates a proper subclass of simple matrix languages, known to be mildly context-sensitive ones, is still mildly context-sensitive. Furthermore, we get an infinite hierarchy of mildly context-sensitive families of languages. Then we attempt to fill a gap regarding the linguistic relevance of these mechanisms which consists in defining a tree structure on the strings gen…Read more
  •  5
    ABBA: An Educational Appreciation
    with Vladimir J. Konečni, Damien Freeman, S. K. Wertz, Pascal Gielen, Jannie Ph Pretorius, D. Stephan du Toit, Glynnis Daries, and Alzo David-West
    The Journal of Aesthetic Education 47 (1): 72-103. 2013.
    In this essay the authors provide arguments that teaching is an art and that teachers can learn much about their trade from a careful study of the performances of other artists. Artists and teachers have the same basic challenge: in order to be successful, both groups have to obtain and retain peoples’ attention. This also holds for popular music artists. Ten female student teachers specializing in the Pre-school and Foundation phases of schooling (four-to-six-year olds), and six lecturers from …Read more