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69Dual carving and minimal rationalismAnalytic Philosophy 62 (3): 223-234. 2021.In his Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2017) Philip Goff defends his anti-physicalist argument against what he calls the "Dual Carving" objection—the idea that two representations of the very same fact could both be conceptually independent and "transparent," that is, revealing of the essences of the entities in question. His defense invokes a thesis he calls "Minimal Rationalism." I explore exactly how Minimal Rationalism is supposed to turn aside the objection and argue that the f…Read more
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73Physicalism UnBlockedCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (7): 890-904. 2020.What has become known asthe blockers problemis an alleged difficulty facing attempts to formulate physicalism as a supervenience thesis. A blocker is an entity, itself contrary to physicalism, with the power to disrupt an otherwise necessary connection between physical and nonphysical conditions. I argue that there is no distinct blockers problem. Insofar as a problem can be identified, it turns out to be just a rather baroque version of a distinct and familiar objection to supervenience formula…Read more
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833Full and partial groundingJournal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (2): 252-271. 2021.Discussion of partial grounds that aren't parts of full grounds; definition of full grounding in terms of partial grounding
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77Platonistic Physicalism without TearsJournal of Consciousness Studies 24 (9-10): 72-90. 2017.Susan Schneider argues that the entities to be identified as part of the 'physical base' for physicalism must be in part abstract and that this fact either falsifies physicalism or renders it so problematic as to be 'no physicalism worth having'. I accept the abstractness of the entities but argue both that physicalism is consistent with such and that none of the alleged problems for Platonistic physicalism are serious.
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19Review of Michael Rea, World without Design (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (4): 603-606. 2003.Book Information World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism. World Without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism Michael Rea, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, pp. viii + 245, US$35.00. By Michael Rea. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pp. viii + 245. US$35.00
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21Chudnoff on the Awareness of Abstract ObjectsFlorida Philosophical Review 16 (1): 105-116. 2016.In his book Intuition, Elijah Chudnoff develops an account of how we might, by having intuitions, be made aware of abstract objects. While the conditions under which we enjoy such awareness are, on his account, happily free of objectionable metaphysics or dubious mechanisms, it is not clear that the conditions bear the epistemic weight they need to carry. To flesh out this worry, I develop an example that is parallel in all relevant respects to cases of intuitive awareness as described by Chudno…Read more
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3Review of Tim Crane, ed., The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (review)Philosophy in Review 13 (1): 8-13. 1993.
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1Demanding Physicalism: The Formulation and Justification of a Reductive MaterialismDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1997.Contemporary materialism labors under two serious difficulties: the problem of formulation and the problem of justification. It remains unclear just what physicalism says or why one should believe it. I propose an explicit formulation and provide a sustained argument for that specific thesis. The overall thesis I defend may be roughly stated thus: every nonphysical particular and lawful fact in the actual world is to be explained by reference to the purely physical in such a way as to imply that…Read more
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32Functionalism and Causal ExclusionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (2): 198-214. 2003.Recent work by Jaegwon Kim and others suggest that functionalism leaves mental properties causally inefficacious in some sense. I examine three lines of argument for this conclusion. The first appeals to Occam's Razor; the second appeals to a ban on overdetermination; and the third charges that the kind of response I favor to these arguments forces me to give up "the homogeneity of mental and physical causation". I show how each argument fails. While I concede that a positive theory of mental ca…Read more
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105The conceptual link from physical to mental by Robert Kirk (review)Analysis 74 (3): 552-556. 2014.
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82Physicality for PhysicalistsTopoi 37 (3): 457-472. 2018.How should the “physical” in “physicalism” be understood? I here set out systematic criteria of adequacy, propose an account, and show how the account meets those criteria. The criteria of adequacy focus on the idea of rational management: to vindicate philosophical practice, the account must make it plausible that we can assess various questions about physicalism. The account on offer is dubbed the “Ideal Naturalist Physics” account, according to which the physical is that which appears in an i…Read more
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3Conceptual analysis, circularity, and the commitments of physicalismActa Analytica 16 (26): 119-133. 2001.
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25Sufficiency claims and physicalism: A formulationIn Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. 2001.
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35Naturalism and PhysicalismIn Robert Barnard & Neil Manson (eds.), Continuum Companion to Metaphysics, Continuum Publishing. pp. 90-120. 2012.A substantial guide providing an overview of both physicalism and metaphysical naturalism, reviewing both questions of formulation and justification for both doctrines. Includes a diagnostic strategy for understanding talk of naturalism as a metaphysical thesis.
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114From metaphysics to ethics: A defence of conceptual analysis (review)Philosophical Review 109 (3): 459-462. 2000.
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Tim Crane, ed., The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (review)Philosophy in Review 13 8-13. 1993.
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102Review of: Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy. (review)Metaphilosophy 42 (1-2): 155-160. 2011.
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62Review of Andrew Melnyk, A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (6). 2004.
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689Intrinsicality without naturalnessPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2). 2005.Defense of an account of intrinsic properties in terms of (what is now called) grounding rather than naturalness.
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27Christopher S. Hill, Thought and World: An Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence (review)Philosophical Inquiry 26 (4): 142-145. 2004.
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60Brad Hooker and Margaret Olivia Little , Moral Particularism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2000, pp. xiv + 317 (review)Utilitas 13 (3): 369. 2001.
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82Supervenience physicalism and the problem of extrasSouthern Journal of Philosophy 37 (2): 315-31. 1999.
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61From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (review)Philosophical Review 109 (3): 459. 2000.This slim volume is sure to provoke. The topics include physicalism, the theory of color, and metaethics, but the primary focus is metaphilosophical: Jackson aims to defend the use of conceptual analysis as a tool for doing “serious metaphysics.”
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47A Simple Theory of IntrinsicalityIn Robert M. Francescotti (ed.), Companion to Intrinsic Properties, De Gruyter. pp. 111-138. 2014.
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76What is wrong with the manifestability argument for supervenienceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1): 84-89. 1998.The manifestability argument presented by Papineau and Loewer turns on the premise that nonphysical properties are capable of making a difference to physical conditions. From this and the completeness of physics a strenuous supervenience conclusion is supposed to follow. I argue that the plausible version of this premise implies a weaker supervenience thesis only, one that is too weak to be of any use for a physicalist. There is a more contentious premise one might use to deduce the needed concl…Read more
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56Review of Christopher Peacocke, Truly Understood (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (6). 2009.
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105Locating the overdetermination problemBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2): 273-286. 2000.Physicalists motivate their position by posing a problem for the opposition: given the causal completeness of physics and the impact of the mental (or, more broadly, the seemingly nonphysical) on the physical, antiphysicalism implies that causal overdetermination is rampant. This argument is, however, equivocal in its use of 'physical'. As Scott Sturgeon has recently argued, if 'physical' means that which is the object of physical theory, completeness is plausible, but the further claim that the…Read more
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91Dupre's anti-essentialist objection to reductionismPhilosophical Quarterly 53 (211): 181-200. 2003.In his 'The Disorder of Things' John Dupré presents an objection to reductionism which I call the 'anti-essentialist objection': it is that reductionism requires essentialism, and essentialism is false. I unpack the objection and assess its cogency. Once the objection is clearly in view, it is likely to appeal to those who think conceptual analysis a bankrupt project. I offer on behalf of the reductionist two strategies for responding, one which seeks to rehabilitate conceptual analysis and one …Read more
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