•  234
    McDowell, scepticism, and the 'veil of perception'
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2): 175-190. 2003.
    McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor.
  •  199
    Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism, and the Problem of Normativity
    Philosophical Topics 36 (1): 193-209. 2008.
    There has always existed in the world, and there will always continue to exist, some kind of metaphysics, and with it the dialectic that is natural to pure reason. It is therefore the first and most important task of philosophy to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its injurious influence, by attacking its errors at their source. - Kant CPR:B xxxi..
  •  185
    Putnam's natural realism and the question of a perceptual interface
    Philosophical Explorations 7 (2): 167-181. 2004.
    In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to.
  •  179
    Naturalism in question (edited book)
    Harvard University Press. 2004.
    This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a ...
  •  147
    Review of Wittgenstein and Scepticism - Edited by Denis Mcmanus (review)
    Philosophical Books 48 (2): 168-170. 2007.
    Wittgenstein has been likened to a Pyrrhonian sceptic, one who employs dialectical skills to avoid rather than defend doctrine, but it is his role in exposing and excavating the sands upon which modern scepticisms have been built that is the subject of this new volume of largely original essays. The first three chapters, by Crispin Wright, Akeel Bilgrami and Michael Williams find inspiration in On Certainty for singling out key moves in the initial set-up of external world scepticism; the next f…Read more
  •  141
    Quinean Naturalism in Question
    Philo 11 (1): 5-18. 2008.
    This paper is a critical discussion of Quine’s naturalist credos: (1) physicalism; (2) there is no first philosophy; (3) philosophy is continuous with science; and (4) the only responsible theory of the world as a whole is scientific theory. The aim is to show that Quine’s formulations admit of two readings: a strong reading (often Quine’s own) which is compatible with reductive forms of naturalism but implausible; and a mild reading which is plausible but suggestive of more liberal forms of nat…Read more
  •  135
    Naturalism and Normativity (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2010.
    Normativity concerns what we ought to think or do and the evaluations we make. For example, we say that we ought to think consistently, we ought to keep our promises, or that Mozart is a better composer than Salieri. Yet what philosophical moral can we draw from the apparent absence of normativity in the scientific image of the world? For scientific naturalists, the moral is that the normative must be reduced to the nonnormative, while for nonnaturalists, the moral is that there must be a transc…Read more
  •  129
    Liberal naturalism and the scientific image of the world
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (5): 565-585. 2019.
    ABSTRACTThis paper distinguishes between the theoretical scientific image and the practical scientific image. The popular idea that there is a conceptual clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world is revealed as largely illusory. From the perspective of a liberal naturalism, the placement problem for ‘problematic’ entities or truths is not solved but dissolved. Persons, say, are not posits of any explanatory science, but beings acknowledged as rational agencies in second-perso…Read more
  •  128
    Introduction - the nature of naturalism
    In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question, Harvard University Press. pp. 1-20. 2004.
    The critical concern of the present volume is contemporary naturalism, both in its scientific version and as represented by newly emerging hopes for another, philosophically more liberal, naturalism.1 The papers collected here are state-of-the-art discussions that question the appeal, rational motivations, and presuppositions of scientific naturalism across a broad range of philosophical topics. As an alternative to scientific naturalism, we offer the outlines of a new non- reductive form of nat…Read more
  •  108
    Skepticism, Self-knowledge and Responsibility
    In Stephen Hetherington (ed.), Aspects of Knowing, Elsevier. pp. 97. 2006.
    Modern skepticism can be usefully divided into two camps: the Cartesian and the Humean.1 Cartesian skepticism is a matter of a theoretical doubt that has little or no practical import in our everyday lives. Its employment concerns whether or not we can achieve a special kind of certain knowledge – something Descartes calls “scientia” 2—that is far removed from our everyday aims or standards of epistemic appraisal. Alternatively, Humean skepticism engages the ancient skeptical concern with whethe…Read more
  •  104
    Putnam, pragmatism and the fate of metaphysics
    European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4 (2): 33-46. 2008.
    In Renewing Philosophy (1992), having surveyed a number of metaphysical programs in contemporary analytic philosophy, including Bernard Williams’ appeal to an absolute conception of the world, Ruth Millikan’s attempt to reduce intentionality to biological function, and Nelson Goodman’s irrealism, Putnam concludes as follows: I have argued that the decision of a large part of contemporary analytic philosophy to become a form of metaphysics is a mistake. Indeed, contemporary analytic metaphysics i…Read more
  •  95
    Reviewing the state of play in the attempt to naturalise content a quarter of a century after John Haugeland’s survey paper “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Dan Hutto and Glenda Satne propose a new naturalistic account of content that supposedly synthesizes what is best in the three failed programs of neo-Cartesianism, neo-Behaviourism and neo-Pragmatism. They propose to appeal to a Relaxed Naturalism, a non-reductive genealogical form of explanation and a primitive notion of contentless ur-inten…Read more
  •  83
    Wittgenstein and expressivism
    In Daniel Whiting (ed.), The Later Wittgenstein on Language, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
    From his first publication, the Tractatus, to the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein draws attention to the way in which surface grammatical similarities mask underlying grammatical diversity. In the Tractatus he writes
  •  70
    A Vision of Blindness: Blade Runner and Moral Redemption
    Film-Philosophy 21 (3): 371-391. 2017.
    Despite its oft-noted ambiguities, critical reception of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Director's Cut ; Final Cut ) has tended to converge upon seeing it as a futuristic sci-fi film noir whose central concern is what it means to be human, a question that is fraught given the increasingly human-like replicants designed and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for human use on off-world colonies. Within the terms of this way of seeing things a great deal of discussion has been devoted to putativ…Read more
  •  67
    The present paper challenges the narrow scientistic conception of Nature that underlies current projects of naturalization involving, say, evaluative or intentional discourse. It is more plausible to hold that science provides only a partial characterization of the natural world. I consider McDowell's articulation of a more liberal naturalism, one which recognizes autonomous normative facts about reasons, meanings and values, as genuine constituents of Nature on a more liberal conception of it. …Read more
  •  63
    In the Synopsis to the Meditations Descartes assures us that ‘extensive doubt… [provides] the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses’. And in the Fifth Replies Descartes adds that it is essential to a proper understanding of the Meditations that ‘the entire testimony of the senses should be regarded as uncertain and even as false’. But to deny our ordinary trust in the senses on the grounds of such ‘hyperbolic’ or ‘metaphysical’ doubts as that one might be dreaming or th…Read more
  •  49
    Review of Jejj Malpas, Place and experience: A philosophical topography (review)
    Philosophical Review 110 (4): 632-634. 2001.
    This is an ambitious work that attempts to elucidate the nature of place and the way in which we are, in part, at least, constituted by and complexly embedded within it. The central claim of the book is that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience”, where experience is understood in a broad sense that is not restricted to perception but also includes thought and action. More generally, “place is... that within which and with respect to which subjectivity itself is …Read more
  •  48
    The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism (edited book)
    with Mario De Caro
    Routledge. 2022.
    This is the first collection to present a comprehensive overview of liberal naturalism. Essential reading for students and researchers in all areas of philosophy it will be of particular interest for those studying philosophical naturalism, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and ethics.
  •  46
    This paper offers a reading of The Awful Truth in order to meditate further on Stanley Cavell's articulation of the themes of the ordinary and perfectionist marriage as exemplified in the genre of films he calls the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in Cavell and . I explore different ways in which this film and the medium of film generally are capable of making the unseen visible: revealing the ordinary that is hidden behind its very familiarity; making available an awareness that we are unseen by…Read more
  •  42
    Reflections on “Architecture is a Gesture” (Wittgenstein)
    Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 23 (1): 88-100. 2014.
  •  42
    Aesthetics (analytic)
    In Graham Oppy Nick Trakakis (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, Monash Up. 2010.
    If Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, then aesthetics is a series of footnotes to Kant. This is as true of the analytic tradition as of the Continental. But there has been an important change of emphasis in the object of inquiry of analytic aesthetics, which predominantly concerns theorising about the experience and criticism of works of art. Kant’s idea of aesthetics as primarily concerned with beauty, or heightened or intensified perceptual experiences of natural phenomena, …Read more
  •  41
    In Stanley Cavell’s ethical universe, no concept is of more moment than that of acknowledgement. In Cavell’s view, the question of acknowledgement is not a matter of choice but is at issue whenever we confront, or are confronted by, others. To acknowledge is to admit or confess or reveal to someone, typically another, those things about oneself and one’s relations to the world and others that one, being human, cannot fail to know – except that “nothing is more human than to deny them”. The quest…Read more
  •  32
    Putnam is famous for often changing his allegiance between various forms of realism and antirealism. In this paper I want to use Putnam’s own reflections and insights on the realism-antirealism issue to provide a powerful case for skepticism about the entire debate—in spite of the fact that that is not Putnam’s own ultimate attitude. From this skeptical perspective, I shall argue that Putnam has helped us see that the realism-antirealism debate faces a dilemma: either it resolves into existence …Read more
  •  29
    Does Rorty have a Blindspot about Truth?
    European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 12 (1). 2020.
    Criticisms of Rorty’s view of truth are so frequent and from such sagacious sources that it is reasonable to suspect that there must be some truth in them. But what? In this paper I consider perhaps the strongest form of such criticism, Huw Price’s claim that without a distinct norm of truth Rorty is unable to make sense of how someone, justified by her own lights (say, local communal standards), could improve her commitments by reference to another better informed community. My aim in the prese…Read more
  •  27
    As a worldview, naturalism depends on a set of cognitive commitments from which flow certain propositions about reality and human nature. These propositions in turn might have implications for how we live, for social policy, and for human flourishing. But the presuppositions, basis, and implications of naturalism are not uncontested, and indeed there’s considerable debate about them among naturalists themselves.
  •  25
    Place and Experience (review)
    Philosophical Review 110 (4): 632-634. 2001.
    This is an ambitious work that attempts to elucidate the nature of place and the way in which we are, in part, at least, constituted by and complexly embedded within it. The central claim of the book is that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience”, where experience is understood in a broad sense that is not restricted to perception but also includes thought and action. More generally, “place is... that within which and with respect to which subjectivity itself is …Read more
  •  23
    Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups
    Educational Theory 67 (2): 215-224. 2017.