•  172
    Counterpossibles, Consequence and Context
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    What is the connection between valid inference and true conditionals? Many conditional logics require that when A is a logical consequence of B, "if B then A" is true. Taking counterlogical conditionals seriously leads to systems that permit counterexamples to that general rule. However, this leaves those of us who endorse non-trivial accounts of counterpossible conditionals to explain what the connection between conditionals and consequence is. The explanation of the connection also answers a c…Read more
  •  19106
    Creeped Out
    In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    This paper examines both creepiness and the distinctive reaction had to creepiness, being “creeped out.” The paper defends a response-dependent account of creepiness in terms of this distinctive reaction, contrasting our preferred account to others that might be offered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of detecting creepiness.
  •  2
    Lewis's Philosophical Method
    In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.
    Lewis is famous as a contemporary philosophical system‐builder. The most obvious way his philosophy exhibited a system was in its content: Lewis's metaphysics provided answers to many metaphysical puzzles in an integrated way. In this chapter, the author offers some suggestions about how Lewis's own methodological stances can be improved. The chapter begins with “starting points”: places where Lewis looked for data for philosophical inquiries. This is followed by a section on one of the distinct…Read more
  •  14
    Review of Cotnoir, A.J. and Varzi, A.C. Mereology (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2023.
    Review of Cotnoir and Varzi's _Mereology_
  •  357
    Zurvanist Supersubstantivalism
    Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 1-19. 2023.
    Zurvanism was an ancient variant of Zoroastrianism. According to Zurvanism, the great powers of good and evil, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, were the sons of a greater god Zurvan, associated with time. According to Eudemus of Rhodes, some Persian thinkers, presumably Zurvanists, took there to be three great principles underlying the world: light, darkness, and greatest of all time (or perhaps, according to Eudemus, space). This paper explores what metaphysics might underlie these doctrines, and …Read more
  •  152
    Charitable Matching and Moral Credit
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    When charitable matching occurs, both the person initially offering the matching donation and the person taking up the offer may well feel they have done something better than if they had donated on their own without matching. They may well feel they deserve some credit for the matched donation as well as their own. Can they both be right? Natural assumptions about charitable matching lead to puzzles that are challenging to resolve in a satisfactory way.
  •  106
    On the Plurality of Parts of Classes
    Dialectica. forthcoming.
    The ontological pictures underpinning David Lewis's Parts of Classes and On the Plurality of Worlds are in some tension. One tension concerns whether the sets and classes of Parts of Classes can be found in Lewis's modal space, since they cannot in general be parts of any possible world. The second is that the atoms that are the mathematical ontology of Parts of Classes seem to meet the criteria for being possible worlds themselves, and so fail to be the material Parts of Classes needs. Two diff…Read more
  •  282
    Conditionals, Supposition and Euthyphro
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Williamson proposes that a "suppositional procedure" is a central heuristic we use to evaluate the truth of conditionals, though he also argues that this method often leads us astray. An alternative approach to the link between supposition and conditionals is to claim that we are guided by our antecedent conditional judgements in our supposing, and in particular in our determining which things follow from an initial supposition. This alternative explanation of the close link between conditionals…Read more
  •  456
    Grounding, Explanation, and the Tasks of Metaphysics
    In Aaron Segal & Nick Stang (eds.), Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Thinking about metaphysical problems in terms of grounding has its uses, but those uses are limited. This paper argues against attempts to see issues of grounding as having a central and organising role in metaphysical inquiry. After arguing that grounding does some useful work, this paper will argue that grounding is neither the central tool for understanding explanation in metaphysics, nor defines the subject matter of metaphysics. Instead, grounding tracks only some of the metaphysical explan…Read more
  •  8
    Utility Monsters for the Fission Age
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96 (3): 392-407. 2015.
    One of the standard approaches to the metaphysics of personal identity has some counter‐intuitive ethical consequences when combined with maximising consequentialism and a plausible (though not uncontroversial) doctrine about aggregation of consequences. This metaphysical doctrine is the so‐called ‘multiple occupancy’ approach to puzzles about fission and fusion. It gives rise to a new version of the ‘utility monster’ problem, particularly difficult problems about infinite utility, and a new ver…Read more
  •  442
    Space, time and parsimony
    Noûs 57 (4): 763-783. 2022.
    This paper argues that all of the standard theories about the divisions of space and time can benefit from, and may need to rely on, parsimony considerations. More specifically, whether spacetime is discrete, gunky or pointy, there are wildly unparsimonious rivals to standard accounts that need to be resisted by proponents of those accounts, and only parsimony considerations offer a natural way of doing that resisting. Furthermore, quantitative parsimony considerations appear to be needed in man…Read more
  •  391
    Send in the Clowns
    In Karen Bennett & Dean Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Thought experiments are common where infinitely many entities acting in concert give rise to strange results. Some of these cases, however, can be generalized to yield almost omnipotent systems from limited materials. This paper discusses one of these cases, bringing out one aspect of what seems so troubling about "New Zeno" cases. This paper is in memory of Josh Parsons.
  •  273
    What Would Lewis Do?
    In Helen Beebee & A. R. J. Fisher (eds.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis, Oxford University Press. pp. 220-239. 2022.
    David Lewis rejected consequentialism in ethics. However, two aspects of his meta-ethical views make it a challenge to see how consequentialism could be resisted. Lewis endorses a maximising conception of rationality, where to be rational is to maximise value of a certain sort; he appears to think it is possible to be both rational and moral; and yet he rejects conceptions of moral action as acting to maximise moral value. The second tension in Lewis's views arises from his meta-ethics. Lewis's …Read more
  •  822
    Hyperintensionality
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.
    An overview of hyperintensionality is provided. Hyperintensional languages have expressions with meanings that are more fine-grained than necessary equivalence. That is, the expressions may necessarily co-apply and yet be distinct in meaning. Adequately accounting for theories cast in hyperintensional languages is important in the philosophy of language; the philosophy of mind; metaphysics; and elsewhere. This entry presents a number of areas in which hyperintensionality is important; a range of…Read more
  •  2005
    Marriage and its Limits
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Marriages come in a very wide variety: if the reports of anthropologists and historians are to be believed, an extraordinarily wide variety. This includes some of the more unusual forms, including marriage to the dead; to the gods; and even to plants. This does suggest that few proposed marriage relationships would require 'redefining marriage': but on the other hand, it makes giving a general theory of marriage challenging. So one issue we should face is how accepting we should be of the report…Read more
  •  393
    Abstract Impossible fictions have lessons to teach us about linguistic representation, about mental content and concepts, and about uses of conceivability in epistemology. An adequate theory of impossible fictions may require theories of meaning that can distinguish between different impossibilities; a theory of conceptual truth that allows us to make useful sense of a variety of conceptual falsehoods; and a theory of our understanding of necessity and possibility that permits impossibilities t…Read more
  •  913
    Impossible Fictions Part I: Lessons for Fiction
    Philosophy Compass 16 (2): 1-12. 2021.
    Impossible fictions are valuable evidence both for a theory of fiction and for theories of meaning, mind and epistemology. This article focuses on what we can learn about fiction from reflecting on impossible fictions. First, different kinds of impossible fiction are considered, and the question of how much fiction is impossible is addressed. What impossible fiction contributes to our understanding of "truth in fiction" and the logic of fiction will be examined. Finally, our understanding of unr…Read more
  •  429
    It’s a kind of magic: Lewis, magic and properties
    Synthese 197 (11): 4717-4741. 2020.
    David Lewis’s arguments against magical ersatzism are notoriously puzzling. Untangling different strands in those arguments is useful for bringing out what he thought was wrong with not just one style of theory about possible worlds, but with much of the contemporary metaphysics of abstract objects. After setting out what I take Lewis’s arguments to be and how best to resist them, I consider the application of those arguments to general theories of properties and relations. The constraints Lewis…Read more
  •  714
    Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge
    Res Philosophica 97 (4): 661-685. 2020.
    Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this …Read more
  •  1
    Intension and Extension
    In H. Pashler (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Mind, Sage Publications. pp. 424-427. 2010.
    This encyclopedia entry describes intensions and extensions as aspects of the meanings of pieces of language.
  •  96
    Moral Fictionalism
    Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
    Moral fictionalism is the doctrine that the moral claims we accept should be treated as convenient fictions. One standard kind of moral fictionalism maintains that many of the moral claims we ordinarily accept are in fact false, but these claims are still useful to produce and accept, despite this falsehood. Moral fictionalists claim they can recover many of the benefits of the use of moral concepts and moral language, without the theoretical costs incurred by rivals such as moral realism or tra…Read more
  •  343
    Infinite barbarians
    Ratio 32 (3): 173-181. 2019.
    This paper discusses an infinite regress that looms behind a certain kind of historical explanation. The movement of one barbarian group is often explained by the movement of others, but those movements in turn call for an explanation. While their explanation can again be the movement of yet another group of barbarians, if this sort of explanation does not stop somewhere we are left with an infinite regress of barbarians. While that regress would be vicious, it cannot be accommodated by several …Read more
  •  337
    Intensionality and Hyperintensionality
    Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.
    Routledge Encyclopedia entry on Intensionality and Hyperintensionality
  •  1200
    In May 1999, David Lewis sent Timothy Williamson an intriguing letter about knowledge and vagueness. This paper has a brief discussion of Lewis on evidence, and a longer discussion of a distinctive theory of vagueness Lewis puts forward in this letter, one rather different from standard forms of supervaluationism. Lewis's theory enables him to provide distinctive responses to the challenges to supervaluationism famously offered in chapter 5 of Timothy Williamson's 1994 book Vagueness. However th…Read more
  •  314
    Are There States of Affairs? Yes
    In Elizabeth Barnes (ed.), Current Controversies in Metaphysics, Routledge Press. pp. 81-91. 2017.
    This paper makes a case that we should believe in the existence of worldly states of affairs.
  •  415
    Temporary Marriage
    In Elizabeth Brake (ed.), After Marriage: Rethinking Marital Relationships, Oxford University Press. pp. 180-203. 2015.
    Parties to a temporary marriage agree in advance that their marriage will only last for a fixed period of time unless renewed: that it will automatically expire after two years, for instance, or five, or twenty. This paper defends the claim that temporary marriages deserve state recognition. The main argument for this is an application of a principle of marriage equality. Some other arguments for are also canvassed, including an argument from religious freedom, and a number of arguments agains…Read more
  •  48
    Reflections on Routley's Ultralogic Program
    Australasian Journal of Logic 15 (2): 407-430. 2018.
    In this paper, I take up three tasks in turn. The first is to set out what Routley thought we should demand of an all-purpose universal logic, and some of his reasons for those demands. The second is to sketch Routley's own response to those demands. The third is to explore how else we could satisfy some of the theoretical demands Routley identified, if we are not to follow him in endorsing Routleyan Ultralogic as a foundational logic. As part of this third project, I articulate what seems to me…Read more
  •  292
    Liberalism and mental mediation
    Journal of Value Inquiry 38 (2): 186-202. 2004.
    Liberals agree that free speech should be protected, where speech is understood broadly to include all forms of intentional communication, including actions and pictures, not merely the spoken or written word. A surprising view about free speech in some liberal and legal circles is that communications should be protected on free-speech grounds only if the communications are mentally mediated. By “mentally mediated communication” we mean speech which communicates its message in such a way that th…Read more