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52Russell’s Neutral Monism and PanpsychismIn William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, Routledge. pp. 87-102. 2019.Bertrand Russell’s writings on neutral monism continue to exercise a profound influence on much work on panpsychism. In fact, many interpret his neutral monism as ultimately constituting, entailing, or strongly suggesting some form of panpsychism. But the relationship between Russell’s theory and contemporary panpsychism is complicated. On one hand, his analysis of matter has a number of features that are congenial to panpsychism. On the other hand, his naturalistic analysis of mind is largely a…Read more
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123Radical Empiricism, Neutral Monism, and the Elements of MindThe Monist 104 (1): 125-151. 2021.Neutral monism is the view that both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are grounded in a more fundamental form of reality that is intrinsically neither mental nor material. It has often been treated as an odd fringe theory deserving of at most a footnote in the broader philosophical debates. Yet such attitudes do a grave disservice to its sophistications and significance for late nineteenth and early twentieth-century philosophy of mind and psychology. This paper sheds light on this neglected view by situatin…Read more
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986Russell on Introspection and Self-KnowledgeIn Russell Wahl (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Bertrand Russell, Bloomsburyacademic. pp. 256-285. 2018.This chapter examines Bertrand Russell's developing views--roughly from 1911 to 1918--on the nature of introspective knowledge and subjects' most basic knowledge of themselves as themselves. It argues that Russell's theory of introspection distinguishes between direct awareness of individual psychological objects and features, the presentation of psychological complexes involving those objects and features, and introspective judgments which aim to correspond with them. It also explores his trans…Read more
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1815Panpsychism, Panprotopsychism, and Neutral MonismIn Brian P. McLaughlin (ed.), Philosophy: Mind (MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks), . pp. 51-70. 2017.This chapter provides an introduction to panpsychism, panprotopsychism, and neutral monism to an interdisciplinary audience.
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28Review of Immunity to Error Through Misidentification (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2013.This reviews Simon Prosser's and Francois Recenati's (eds.) 2012 Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: New Essays.
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105Russell on Russellian MonismIn Torin Andrew Alter & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism, Oxford University Press. pp. 91-118. 2015.In recent decades, Russell’s “Neutral Monism” has reemerged as a topic of great scholarly interest among philosophers of mind, philosophers of science, and historians of early analytic philosophy. One of the most controversial points of scholarly dispute regarding Russell’s theory concerns how it best fits into standard classificatory schemes for understanding the relationship between mental phenomena and physical reality. The task of classifying Russell’s Neutral Monism is made all the more di…Read more
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140Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic: New Essays on Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy (edited book)CSLI Publications. 2015.Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic (awarded the 2016 Bertrand Russell Society Book Prize) brings together ten new essays on Bertrand Russell's best-known work, The Problems of Philosophy. These essays, by some of the foremost scholars of his life and works, reexamine Russell's famous distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstra…Read more
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115The Place of The Problems of Philosophy in PhilosophyIn Donovan Wishon & Bernard Linsky (eds.), Acquaintance, Knowledge, and Logic: New Essays on Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, Csli Publications. 2015.This chapter summarizes Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, presents new biographical details about how and why Russell wrote it, and highlights its continued significance for contemporary philosophy. It also surveys Russell’s famous distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract objects.
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255Russellian Acquaintance and Frege’s PuzzleMind 126 (502): 321-370. 2016.In this paper, I argue that a number of recent Russell interpreters, including Evans, Davidson, Campbell, and Proops, mistakenly attribute to Russell what I call ‘the received view of acquaintance’: the view that acquaintance safeguards us from misidentifying the objects of our acquaintance. I contend that Russell’s discussions of phenomenal continua cases show that he does not accept the received view of acquaintance. I also show that the possibility of misidentifying the objects of acquaintanc…Read more
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285Perceptual Aquaintance and Informational ContentIn Sofia Miguens & Gerhard Preyer (eds.), Consciousness and Subjectivity, Ontos Verlag. pp. 89-108. 2012.Many currently working on a Russellian notion of perceptual acquaintance and its role in perceptual experience (including Campbell 2002a, 2002b, and 2009 and Tye 2009) treat naïve realism and indirect realism as an exhaustive disjunction of possible views. In this paper, I propose a form of direct realism according to which one is directly aware of external objects and their features without perceiving a mind-dependent intermediary and without making any inference. Nevertheless, it also maintai…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Bertrand Russell |
20th Century Analytic Philosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |
Self-Knowledge |
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19th Century Philosophy |
American Philosophy |
History of Psychology |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Phenomenology |
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