•  51
    Dual carving and minimal rationalism
    Analytic 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
  •  58
    Physicalism UnBlocked
    Canadian 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
  •  748
    Full and partial grounding
    Journal 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
  •  64
    Platonistic Physicalism without Tears
    Journal 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.
  •  19
    Review 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
  •  21
    Chudnoff on the Awareness of Abstract Objects
    Florida 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
  •  1
    Demanding Physicalism: The Formulation and Justification of a Reductive Materialism
    Dissertation, 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
  •  56
    Functionalism and Causal Exclusion
    Pacific 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
  •  84
    Locating the overdetermination problem
    British 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
  •  79
    Dupre's anti-essentialist objection to reductionism
    Philosophical 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
  •  53
    Stalking the elusive physicalist thesis Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9528-2 Authors D. Gene Witmer, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, P. O. Box 118545, Gainesville, FL 32611-8545, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
  •  23
    On Making Everything Boring
    Florida Philosophical Review 11 (1): 1-16. 2011.
    Presidential Address for the 2011 meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association. A somewhat playful but also serious meditation on ways in which the philosophical impulse can be understood as an urge to demystify or render "boring." Topics include psychological peculiarities of philosophers, reflections on methods for teaching students at an introductory level, the contrast between science and philosophy, the sense in which philosophy may or may not begin in "wonder," and why we should value …Read more
  •  145
    How to be a (sort of) A Priori physicalist
    Philosophical Studies 131 (1): 185-225. 2006.
    What has come to be known as “a priori physicalism” is the thesis, roughly, that the non-physical truths in the actual world can be deduced a priori from a complete physical description of the actual world. To many contemporary philosophers, a priori physicalism seems extremely implausible. In this paper I distinguish two kinds of a priori physicalism. One sort – strict a priori physicalism – I reject as both unmotivated and implausible. The other sort – liberal a priori physicalism – I argue is…Read more
  •  40
    Multiple realizability and psychological laws: Evaluating Kim's challenge
    In Sven Walter & Heinz-Dieter Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation, Imprint Academic. pp. 59. 2003.
    A close examination of Kim's argument in "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction" for the claim that if a kind is multiply realizable in a way that blocks identification with more fundamental properties it is also a kind unlikely to appear as an appropriate kind in a theory in the first place. Ultimately, I argue that there is one reasonably promising argument of this sort, but its success turns on explanatory questions the answers to which are far from obvious.
  •  34
    Experience, appearance, and hidden features
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 7. 2001.
    Charles Siewert has given us an ingenious thought experiment involving a limited lack of conscious experience. The possibility of the described case is incompatible with a number of popular theories of consciousness. Siewert acknowledges, however, that this possibility is not a direct threat to "hidden feature" theories. I aim to do two things: first, strengthen his defense of the claim that the case is genuinely possible by considering and rejecting some further attempts to explain away our tem…Read more
  •  71
    Physicality for Physicalists
    Topoi 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
  •  42
    Is natural kindness a natural kind?
    Philosophical Studies 90 (3): 245-264. 1998.
  •  35
    Naturalism and Physicalism
    In Robert Barnard & Neil Manson (eds.), Continuum Companion to Metaphysics, . 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.
  •  86
    From metaphysics to ethics: A defence of conceptual analysis (review)
    Philosophical Review 109 (3): 459-462. 2000.
  • Tim Crane, ed., The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception (review)
    Philosophy in Review 13 8-13. 1993.