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82Self-Love, Love of Neighbour, and ImpartialityIn John Cottingham, Nafsika Athanassoulis & Samantha Vice (eds.), The moral life: essays in honour of John Cottingham, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 58. 2008.
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12Co-operation in the age of Hobby Lobby: when sincerity is not enoughExpositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 11 (1): 15-30. 2017.
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104'Whatever is Changing is being Changed by Something Else': A Reappraisal of Premise One of the First WayIn John Cottingham & Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, Oxford University Press. pp. 140-164. 2010.
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70Psycho-Physical Dualism Today: An Interdisciplinary ApproachLexington Books. 2008.Until quite recently, mind-body dualism has been regarded with deep suspicion by both philosophers and scientists. This has largely been due to the widespread identification of dualism in general with one particular version of it: the interactionist substance dualism of Réné Descartes. This traditional form of dualism has, ever since its first formulation in the seventeenth century, attracted numerous philosophical objections and is now almost universally rejected in scientific circles as empiri…Read more
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35Perceptual relativismPhilosophia 16 (1): 1-9. 1986.What follows axe the provisional conclusions reached in my thoughts about a frequently encountered, established argument for perceptual relativism. Rather than attempting the misleading task of dcfming in a sentence this doctrine - for it is so widely espoused by philosophers and Iaymcn alike that it deserves to bc called a doctrine — I shall instead elucidate it by thc common argu— ment for it that I wish to deal with, which Ishall call thc argument from differing perceptual apparatus, or ADP. …Read more
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45Who’s afraid of reverse mereological essentialism?Philosophical Studies 1-22. 2023.Whereas Mereological Essentialism is the thesis that the parts of an object are essential to it, Reverse Mereological Essentialism is the thesis that the whole is essential to its parts. Specifically—since RME is an Aristotelian doctrine—it is a claim not about objects in general but about substances. Here I set out and explain RME as it should be understood from the perspective of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, as well as proposing a kind of master argument for believing it. A number of…Read more
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65Who's afraid of Reverse Mereological Essentialism?Philosophical Studies 1-22. 2023.Whereas Mereological Essentialism is the thesis that the parts of an object are essential to it, Reverse Mereological Essentialism is the thesis that the whole is essential to its parts. Specifically – since RME is an Aristotelian doctrine – it is a claim not about objects in general but about substances. Here I set out and explain RME as it should be understood from the perspective of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, as well as proposing a kind of master argument for believing it. A numbe…Read more
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49Organisms and other biological entities are mistake-prone: they get things wrong. The entities of pure physics, such as atoms and inorganic molecules, do not make mistakes: they do what they do according to physical law, with no room for error except on the part of the physicist or their theory. We set out a novel framework for understanding biology and its demarcation from physics – that of mistake-making. We distinguish biological mistakes from mere failures. We then propose a rigorous definit…Read more
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Formal causation : accidental and substantialIn Ludger Jansen & Petter Sandstad (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Formal Causation, Routledge. 2021.
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180Applied Ethics: A Non-Consequentialist ApproachWiley-Blackwell. 2000.Applied Ethics focuses the central concepts of traditional morality from the companion book Moral Theory - rights, justice, the good, virtue, and the fundamental value of human life - on a number of pressing contemporary problems, including abortion, euthanasia, animals, capital punishment, and war.
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124Is prime matter energy?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3): 534-550. 2023.This paper tests the following hypothesis: that the prime matter of classical Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics is numerically identical to energy. Is P=E? After outlining the classical Aristotelian concept of prime matter, I provide the master argument for it based on the phenomenon of substantial change. I then outline what we know about energy as a scientific concept, including its role and application in some key fields. Next, I consider the arguments in favour of prime matter being identi…Read more
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24Mistake-making: a theoretical framework for generating research questions in biology, with illustrative application to blood clottingQuarterly Review of Biology 97 (1): 1-13. 2022.It is a matter of contention whether or not a general explanatory framework for the biological sciences would be of scientific value, or whether it is even achievable. In this paper we suggest that both are the case, and we outline proposals for a framework capable of generating new scientific questions. Starting with one clear characteristic of biological systems – that they all have the potential to make mistakes - we aim to describe the nature of this potential and the common processes that l…Read more
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21The Order of CharityZeitschrift Für Ethik Und Moralphilosophie 4 (2): 337-355. 2021.This paper defends partiality as an inherent, essential part of ethical decision-making. First, the concept of charity as a kind of universal benevolence is spelled out, drawing on key ideas from classical religious thinking. I then argue that any justification of partiality must appeal to the good first, rather than rights. There follows a justification of partiality via an argument from the idea of control over the good. The next section seeks to harmonize partialistic preference with universa…Read more
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9Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (review)Philosophical Studies (Dublin) 33 291-301. 1991.
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15Opting Out: Conscience and Cooperation in a Pluralistic SocietyInstitute of Economic Affairs. 2018.We live in a liberal, pluralistic, largely secular society where, in theory, there is fundamental protection for freedom of conscience generally and freedom of religion in particular. There is, however, both in statute and common law, increasing pressure on religious believers and conscientious objectors (outside wartime) to act in ways that violate their sincere, deeply held beliefs. This is particularly so in health care, where conscientious objection is coming under extreme pressure. I argue …Read more
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134Divine premotionInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 79 (3): 207-222. 2016.According to divine premotionism, God does not merely create and sustain the universe. He also moves all secondary causes to action as instruments without undermining their intrinsic causal efficacy. I explain and uphold the premotionist theory, which is the theory of St Thomas Aquinas and his most prominent exponents. I defend the premotionist interpretation of Aquinas in some textual detail, with particular reference to Suarez and to a recent paper by Louis Mancha. Critics, including Molinists…Read more
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66The Metaphysics of Good and EvilRoutledge. 2020.The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil - the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds …Read more
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69Death, unity and the brainTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 40 (5): 359-379. 2019.The Dead Donor Rule holds that removing organs from a living human being without their consent is wrongful killing. The rule still prevails in most countries, and I assume it without argument in order to pose the question: is it possible to have a metaphysically correct, clinically relevant analysis of human death that makes organ donation possible? I argue that the two dominant criteria of death, brain death and circulatory death, are both empirically and metaphysically inadequate as definition…Read more
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36How special is medical conscience?The New Bioethics 25 (3): 207-220. 2019.The vigorous legal and ethical debates over conscientious objection have taken place largely within the domain of health care. Is this because conscience in medicine is of a special kind, or are th...
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143On a so-called demonstration of the causal power of absencesStudia Neoaristotelica 16 (1): 141-148. 2019.Tyron Goldschmidt has recently published a non-paper in which he claims to demonstrate the causal power of absences. His non-paper is, precisely, an empty page. The non-paper is ingenious and at first ‘glance’ the ‘reader’ might think that the absence of words on the page does prove that negative beings can literally cause states such as surprise or disappointment. Closer analysis, however, shows that Goldschmidt’s clever non-paper not only lacks words but also lacks causal power. Serious metaph…Read more
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137Real EssentialismRoutledge. 2007._Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essen…Read more
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30We live in a liberal, pluralistic, largely secular society where, in theory, there is fundamental protection for freedom of conscience generally and freedom of religion in particular. There is, however, both in statute and common law, increasing pressure on religious believers and conscientious objectors to act in ways that violate their sincere, deeply held beliefs. This is particularly so in health care, where conscientious objection is coming under extreme pressure. I argue that freedom of re…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |