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6There's more to consider than knowledge and beliefBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Phillips et al. present a number of arguments for the premise that knowledge is more basic than belief. Although their arguments are coherent and sound, they do not directly address numerous cases in which belief appears to be a developmental precursor to knowledge. I describe several examples, not necessarily as a direct challenge, but rather to better understand their framework.
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4Imaginative processes in children are not particularly imaginativeBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.The authors argue that children prefer fictions with imaginary worlds. But evidence from the developmental literature challenges this claim. Children's choices of stories and story events show that they often prefer realism. Further, work on the imagination's relation to counterfactual reasoning suggests that an attraction to unrealistic fiction would undermine the imagination's role in helping children understand reality.
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14Growing out of your own mind: Reexamining the development of the self-other difference in the unexpected contents taskCognition 235 (C): 105403. 2023.
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100Bayes and Blickets: Effects of Knowledge on Causal Induction in Children and AdultsCognitive Science 35 (8): 1407-1455. 2011.People are adept at inferring novel causal relations, even from only a few observations. Prior knowledge about the probability of encountering causal relations of various types and the nature of the mechanisms relating causes and effects plays a crucial role in these inferences. We test a formal account of how this knowledge can be used and acquired, based on analyzing causal induction as Bayesian inference. Five studies explored the predictions of this account with adults and 4-year-olds, using…Read more
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21Reach tracking reveals dissociable processes underlying cognitive controlCognition 152 (C): 114-126. 2016.
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15Children’s developing understanding of the relation between variable causal efficacy and mechanistic complexityCognition 129 (3): 494-500. 2013.
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2Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 9 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2023.This is the ninth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields.
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15Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 9 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2023.This is Volume 9 of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. It contains papers on democracy, the law, political liberalism, voting, social experimentation, state neutrality, equality and incentives, self-ownership, drugs and prostitution, and Lincoln. Chapters include: “Challenging Democratic Commitments: On Liberal Arguments for Instrumentalism About Democracy” (Daniel Viehoff); “Emotional Abuse and the Law” (Elizabeth Brake); “Practical Political Liberalism” (Caleb Perl); “Beyond the Voting De…Read more
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Parfit's Case against SubjectivismIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Volume 6: Volume 6, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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21Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 7 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2021.This is the seventh volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory.
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159A robust hybrid theory of well-beingPhilosophical Studies 178 (9): 2829-2851. 2020.This paper articulates and defends a novel hybrid account of well-being. We will call our view a Robust Hybrid. We call it robust because it grants a broad and not subservient role to both objective and subjective values. In this paper we assume, we think plausibly but without argument, that there is a significant objective component to well-being. Here we clarify what it takes for an account of well-being to have a subjective component. Roughly, we argue, it must allow that favoring attitudes t…Read more
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16Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 6 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2020.This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory
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52Parfit's Case against Subjectivism 1Oxford Studies in Metaethics 6. 2011.Derek Parfit, in On What Matters, argues that all subjective accounts of normative reasons for action are false. This chapter focuses on his “Agony Argument.” The first premise of the Agony Argument is that we necessarily have current reasons to avoid our own future agony. Its second premise is that subjective accounts cannot vindicate this fact. So, the argument concludes, subjective accounts must be rejected. This chapter accepts the first premise of this argument and that it is valid. The mai…Read more
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5Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 6 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2020.This is the sixth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory
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300The Point of Self-OwnershipIn David Schmidtz & Carmen Pavel (eds.), Oxford Handbook on Freedom, Oxford University Press. pp. 124-40. 2018.I examine what the point of self-ownership might best be thought to be.
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1101The Ethics of Eating MeatPhilosophic Exchange 46 (1). 2017.I explore the ethical issues involved in eating meat.
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305How to be a SubjectivistIn Ruth Chang & Kurt Sylvan (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Practical Reason, Routledge. forthcoming.Subjectivism, desires, reasons, well-being, ethics
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489"Understanding the Demandingness Objection"In Douglas W. Portmore (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.This paper examines possible interpretations of the Demandingness Objection as it is supposed to work against Consequentialist ethical theories.
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112The Case for Stance Dependent ReasonsJournal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15 (2). 2019.Many philosophers maintain that neither one’s reasons for action nor well-being are ever grounded in facts about what we desire or favor. Yet our reasons to eat a flavor of ice cream we like rather than one we do not seem an obvious counter-example. I argue that there is no getting around such examples and that therefore a fully stance independent account of the grounding of our reasons is implausible. At least in matters of mere taste our “stance” plays a normative role in grounding reasons.
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4Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 5 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.This is the fifth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory.
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5Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, vol. 2 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2016.This is the second volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. The papers in this volume address a range of central topics and represent cutting edge wo…Read more
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Full information theories of the goodIn Peter Singer (ed.), Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 104--784. 1994.
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17Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy, Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.This is the third volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory.
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169Pleasure as a Mental StateUtilitas 11 (2): 230. 1999.Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position
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Well-Being and ConsequentialismDissertation, University of Michigan. 1997.There are two common assumptions about well-being that I am especially concerned to dispute in this dissertation. The first assumption is that differences in kinds of prudential values can be reduced to differences in amount of prudential value. That is, that differences in the qualities of values can reliably be reduced to mere differences in quantity. The second assumption is that well-being is the appropriate object of moral concern. Consequentialist moral theories typically argue that morali…Read more
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927Disagreeing about how to disagreePhilosophical Studies 168 (3): 823-34. 2014.David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main conclusions.
Syracuse, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |