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8Pragmatism and ProgressIn Clifford S. Stagoll & Michael P. Levine (eds.), Pragmatism Applied: William James and the Challenges of Contemporary Life, Suny Press. pp. 101-122. 2019.
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25Integrity and the UniversityPhilosophy of Management 23 (1): 109-124. 2024.This paper examines the idea of the integrity of academic practice. We offer an account of the integrity of professional practice in general before applying it to academic professional practice within the contemporary, western university. We then introduce the concept of integrity traps and explain how they can make it difficult for academics working within a contemporary university environment to maintain their integrity.
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32Between death and suffering: resolving the gamer’s dilemmaEthics and Information Technology 25 (3): 1-9. 2023.The gamer’s dilemma, initially proposed by Luck (Ethics and Information Technology 11(1):31–36, 2009) posits a moral comparison between in-game acts of murder and in-game acts of paedophilia within single-player videogames. Despite each activity lacking the obvious harms of their real-world equivalents, common intuitions suggest an important difference between them. Some responses to the dilemma suggest that intuitive responses to the two cases are based on important differences between the acts…Read more
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32Philosophy of emotion Volume 2Philosophical Psychology 32 (6): 992-999. 2019.Volume 32, Issue 6, August 2019, Page 992-999.
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52Three problems for the evolutionary debunking argumentRatio 36 (1): 41-50. 2023.In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question …Read more
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71“I am not living next door to no zombie”: Posthumans and PrejudiceCritical Philosophy of Race 4 (1): 74-94. 2016.Posthumanist film and television is both a vehicle for reflection on discrimination and prejudice and a means of gratifying in fantasy deeply imbedded human impulses towards prejudice. Discrimination lies at the heart of posthuman narratives whenever the posthuman coalesces around an identifiable group in conflict with humans. We first introduce the idea of prejudice as a form of psychological defense, contrasting it with other accounts of prejudice in the philosophical literature. We then apply…Read more
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26Competition, contest and the possibility of egalitarian university educationJournal of Philosophy in Schools 6 (1): 10-25. 2019.Competition and contest underpin academic life in many ways, not all of them constructive or valuable. In this paper I make a start on the task of distinguishing valuable academic competition from its opposite and suggest reforms of academic institutions that would diminish the prevalence of destructive competition and approach more nearly the egalitarian goal of treating all members of the academic community—especially, but not only, students—as equally valued and equally deserving of respect. …Read more
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25Review of Moral realism: A defence by R Shafer-Landau (review)Philosophical Books 46 (1): 92-93. 2005.
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12Review of Soren Haggqvist, Thought Experiments in Philosophy (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1): 120-132. 1998.
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11On the Value of Natural RelationsEnvironmental Ethics 19 (2): 173-183. 1997.In “A Refutation of Environmental Ethics” Janna Thompson argues that by assigning intrinsic value to nonhuman elements of nature either our evaluations become arbitrary, and therefore unjustified, or impractical, or justified and practical, but only by reflecting human interest, thus failing to be truly intrinsic to nonhuman nature. There are a number of possible responses to her argument, some of which have been made explicitly in reply to Thompson and others which are implicit in the literatur…Read more
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34Integrity and the Virtues of Reason: Leading a Convincing Life, written by Greg ScherkoskeJournal of Moral Philosophy 13 (5): 627-630. 2016.BOOK REVIEW Extract: Integrity, it seems, is a matter of remaining true to oneself, or rather, it is a matter of remaining true to what one reasonably judges to be the best of oneself. In Integrity and the Virtues of Reason, Greg Scherkoske seeks to overturn this piece of conventional wisdom. It is a fine book and I learned a lot from it. Scherkoske elaborates and defends the idea that integrity is an epistemic virtue; that it is not fundamentally a matter of being true to oneself but of being a…Read more
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24Academic Virtues: Site Specific and Under ThreatJournal of Value Inquiry 50 (4): 753-767. 2016.Extract: Clearly, academic life takes place at the intersection of many social practices. If MacIntyre is right, the role-specific virtues of academic life should be understood in terms of these practices.2 Academic virtues are those excellences required to obtain the internal goods of the social practices constituting academic life. And the social practices of academic life are sustained, competitive and cooperative attempts to achieve a set of academic goals and realize academic forms of excel…Read more
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17Cartesian Questions: Method and MetaphysicsInternational Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2): 241-242. 2001.
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25Reflections in a MirrorDiametros 41 1-12. 2014.In this paper, I develop a solution to the puzzle of mirror perception: why do mirrors appear to reverse the image of an object along a left/right axis and not around other axes, such as the top/bottom axis? I set out the different forms the puzzle takes and argue that one form of it – arguably the key form – has not been satisfactorily solved. I offer a solution in three parts: setting out the conditions in which an apparent left/right reversal of mirror images is generated; explaining why thes…Read more
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16Le Fils and the Limits of Philosophical EthicsSubstance 45 (3): 84-97. 2016.This paper is a study in contrasts. In the first part, I describe one prominent set of approaches to representing the ethical: those of analytic philosophy and the experimental moral psychology inspired by it. I argue that what is missing in this approach is a perspicuous representation of the ethical. The term “perspicuous representation” is drawn from the work of Wittgenstein, where it means a way of representing phenomena that reveals the inner connections between their parts or aspects and m…Read more
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39Scepticism and the InterpreterPhilosophical Papers 29 (2): 61-72. 2000.Abstract This paper defends an argument from interpretation against the possibility of massive error. The argument shares many important features with Donald Davidson's famous argument, but also key differences. I defend the argument against claims that it begs the question against scepticism and that it leaves the sceptic with an obvious means of escape
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30In this chapter I use a film by the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Le Fils, to explore the difference between Stoic and Anti-Stoic approaches to overcoming victimhood. The Stoic approach to overcoming victimhood emphasizes the inner-strength and resourcefulness of victims. It sets up an ideal of Stoic independence in which a person responds to becoming a victim by marshalling inner resources to overcome destructive and painful emotions. An Anti-Stoic approach to overcoming vict…Read more
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106Integrity, commitment, and indirect consequentialismJournal of Value Inquiry 39 (1): 61-73. 2005.
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308Modelling the Moral Dimension of DecisionsNoûs 44 (3): 503-529. 2010.In this paper we explore the connections between ethics and decision theory. In particular, we consider the question of whether decision theory carries with it a bias towards consequentialist ethical theories. We argue that there are plausible versions of the other ethical theories that can be accommodated by “standard” decision theory, but there are also variations of these ethical theories that are less easily accommodated. So while “standard” decision theory is not exclusively consequentialis…Read more
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3Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2): 241-242. 2001.
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20Welcome to Su: the spectral universityAngelaki 21 (2): 213-226. 2016.While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an “uncanny” spectral presence. The encompassing ethico-philosophical question i…Read more
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23Review of Gerald Vision, Veritas: the correspondence theory and its critics (review)Philosophical Books 47 (3): 277-279. 2006.
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83Metaphysical realism and idealisationPhilosophia 26 (3-4): 465-487. 1998.Hilary Putnam's famous model-theoretic arguments have the virtue of presenting metaphysical realists with a clear challenge. On pain of embracing either an implausible antifallibilism or the radical indeterminacy of reference, metaphysical realists must appeal to metalinguistic levels of interpretation richer than our own in order to fix meaning. And sense must be made of this appeal. In this paper I begin the task of developing a version of metaphysical realism that takes up this challenge.
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58Violinists Run Amuck in South Dakota: Screen Doors Down in the Badlands!Philosophical Papers 35 (2): 267-281. 2006.Re-Reading: Judith Jarvis Thompson, 'A Defense of Abortion'
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347 Avatar: Racism and Prejudice on PandoraIn Dan Flory & Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo (eds.), Race, Philosophy, and Film, Routledge. pp. 50--117. 2013.
Areas of Specialization
Normative Ethics |
Value Theory, Miscellaneous |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Normative Ethics |
Value Theory, Miscellaneous |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Aesthetics |