•  3
    Wittgenstein, Human Beings and Conversation
    Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein. 2021.
    The papers in this volume can be roughly divided between?the philosophy of mind? and?the philosophy of language?. They are, however, united by the idea that this standard philosophical classification stands in the way of clear thinking about many of the core issues. With this, they are united by the idea that the notion of a human being must be central to any philosophical discussion of issues in this area, and by an insistence on an inescapably ethical dimension of any adequate discussion of th…Read more
  •  17
    Determinism, Blameworthiness, and Deprication
    Philosophical Quarterly 41 (162): 120-120. 1991.
  •  89
    A Dialogue on Scientific Rationality
    Cogito 5 (3): 135-140. 1991.
  •  5
    Fatalism: thoughts about tomorrow's sea battle
    Philosophy 94 (2): 295-312. 2019.
    The hold of the fatalistic reasoning that Aristotle criticizes is dependent, first, on the idea, articulated by Frege, that the real candidates for truth and falsity are something other than particular contingent happenings such as affirmations or thinkings, and, second, on the idea that the demand for speculative reflection overrides any demand for practical deliberation. Standard challenges to the reasoning embody the same presuppositions and so simply perpetuate the core confusions. They do s…Read more
  •  41
    The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being depend…Read more
  •  88
  • Other Human Beings
    Philosophy 66 (258): 529-531. 1991.
  •  71
    The Evidence for Reincarnation
    Religious Studies 27 (2). 1991.
    There are significant numbers of well-documented cases of the following general kind. At the age of 3 or 4 a child starts to make claims about his past which clearly do not correspond to anything that has happened in his present life. He claims to remember living in a certain place, doing certain things, being with certain people, and so on. It is then found that these memory claims fit the life of a person who died shortly before the child was born. The accuracy of the memory claims is striking…Read more
  •  31
    Other human beings
    St. Martin's Press. 1990.
    The author argues that a view of what a person is cannot be separated from our view of how another person is to be treated. What is needed is an acknowledgement of the tangible, persisting human being--a being with a distinctive bodily form and having its own distinctive kind of value--as a fundamental feature of our thought.
  •  129
    Language, belief and human beings
    In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 141-157. 2001.
    We may think of the core of Cartesian dualism as being the thesis that each of us is essentially a non-material mind or soul: ‘non-material’ in the sense that it has no weight, cannot be seen or touched, and could in principle continue to exist independently of the existence of any material thing. That idea was, of course, of enormous importance to Descartes himself, and we may feel that having rejected it, as most philosophers now have, we have rejected what is of greatest philosophical signifi…Read more
  •  12
    The Idea of a Person as He is in Himself
    Philosophical Investigations 11 (1): 13-27. 1988.
  • GILBERT, PAUL Human Relationships (review)
    Philosophy 67 (n/a): 262. 1992.
  •  25
    Counterfactuals and the Self
    Philosophical Investigations 17 (2): 380-387. 1994.
  • Ashok Vohra, Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mind (review)
    Philosophy in Review 7 39-41. 1987.
  •  45
    The problem of the past
    Philosophical Quarterly 37 (146): 54-77. 1987.
  •  6
    Review: Braine on the Mind (review)
    Religious Studies 30 (3). 1994.
  •  9
    No Title available: New Books (review)
    Philosophy 64 (248): 272-274. 1989.
  •  26
    Responsibility and Necessity
    Philosophy 70 (273). 1995.
    It is widely assumed that there is some form of logical tension between the idea that everything that happens happens of necessity and the idea that people are sometimes responsible for what they do. If there is such a tension it ought to be possible to characterize the notions of necessity and responsibility in a way such that the incompatibility is transparent
  •  3
    Editorials: Stars in the West
    Philosophy 64 (n/a): 283. 1989.
  •  1
    Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch
    Philosophical Books 32 (4): 227-229. 1991.
  •  4
    Books Received: Books Received (review)
    Philosophy 64 (248): 277-282. 1989.
  •  47
    Time in Consciousness, Consciousness in Time
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 67 183-201. 2010.
    The paper is a criticism of the idea that a notion of has a significant role to play in the attempt to understand how the experience of change is possible. Discussion of such experience must give a significant place to its public and private manifestations. How should we picture the relationship between the experience of change and its manifestations? While we cannot identify these, we need not conclude that is something distinct from any of its public or private manifestations. With that, we ca…Read more
  •  73
    We view things from a certain position in time: in our language, thought, feelings and actions, we draw distinctions between what has happened, is happening, and will happen. Frequently, approaches to this feature of our lives - those seen in disputes between tensed and tenseless theories, between realist and anti-realist treatments of past and future, and in accounts of historical knowledge - embody serious misunderstandings of the character of the issues; they misconstrue the relation between …Read more
  •  16
    Language, Belief and Human Beings
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53 141-157. 2003.
    We may think of the core of Cartesian dualism as being the thesis that each of us is essentially a non-material mind or soul: ‘non-material’ in the sense that it has no weight, cannot be seen or touched, and could in principle continue to exist independently of the existence of any material thing. That idea was, of course, of enormous importance to Descartes himself, and we may feel that having rejected it, as most philosophers now have, we have rejected what is of greatest philosophical signifi…Read more
  •  23
    The Mind, the Brain and the Face
    Philosophy 60 (234): 477-493. 1985.
    ‘Only of a living human being and what resembles a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’. 1 ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’. Anyone who believes that Wittgenstein's remarks here embody important truths has quite a bit of explaining to do. What needs to be explained is why it is that enormous numbers of people, people who have never had the chance to be corrupted by reading Descartes or Dennett, ar…Read more
  •  43
    Human Beings (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 1991.
    What is the importance of the notion 'human being'? The contributors to this collection have radically different approaches, some accepting and others denying its validity for a proper understanding of what a person is and for our ethical thought about each other. Contributors on both sides of the divide eloquently defend their views in ways that stand in sharp contrast to some current work in moral philosophy and philosophy of mind. Epistemological and theological issues are also raised in the …Read more
  •  35
    Capital Punishment and Realism
    Philosophy 66 (256). 1991.
    In its treatment of capital punishment Amnesty International gives a central place to the suffering of the prisoner. Two quite distinct forms of suffering are relevant here. There is the psychological anguish of the person awaiting execution; and there is the physical suffering which may be involved in the execution itself. It is suggested that if we reflect clearly on this suffering we will conclude that the death penalty involves cruelty of a kind which makes it quite unacceptable. It is to be…Read more