•  245
    Delusions and Everyday Life
    In Ema Sullivan-Bissett (ed.), Belief, Imagination, and Delusion, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    This chapter aims to get away from the ‘psychological attitude’ approach framing current philosophical discussion of delusion. We ask not what kind of attitude a delusion is – a belief or an imagination? Something else? – as if it were already clear what the ‘content’ of a delusion could be. We aim instead to shift attention to the question of the ‘object’ of delusions. What is delusion of? What is the object of this form of thinking? This focus on a delusion’s object, over its attitudinal natur…Read more
  •  154
    Forms of Rational Agency
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80 171-193. 2017.
    A measure of good and bad is internal to something falling under it when that thing falls under the measure in virtue of what it is. The concept of an internal standard has broad application. Compare the external breed standards arbitrarily imposed at a dog show with the internal standards of health at work in the veterinarian's office. This paper is about practical standards, measures of acting well and badly, and so measures deployed in deliberation and choice. More specifically, it is about t…Read more
  •  204
    Other wills: the second-person in ethics
    Philosophical Explorations 17 (3): 279-288. 2014.
    Other wills: the second-person in ethics. . ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/13869795.2014.941907
  •  162
    Action as a form of temporal unity: on Anscombe’s Intention
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45 (5): 609-629. 2015.
    The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive…Read more
  •  54
    Über das Problem des Handelns
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 61 (3): 357-372. 2013.
    “On the Problem of Action” contrasts two conceptions of the task of action theory: the dominant conception, which I call the decompositional approach, and an alternative, non-decompositional approach that is implicit in the tradition of action theory descending from Aristotle. Decompositionalists seek to characterize intentional action as a composite of something inward and something outward, bound together by some generic kind of causal relation. I show that this approach is committed to charac…Read more
  •  203
  •  311
    Must There Be Basic Action?
    Noûs 47 (2): 273-301. 2012.
    The idea of basic action is a fixed point in the contemporary investigation of the nature of action. And while there are arguments aimed at putting the idea in place, it is meant to be closer to a gift of common sense than to a hard-won achievement of philosophical reflection. It first appears at the stage of innocuous description and before the announcement of philosophical positions. And yet, as any decent magician knows, the real work so often gets done in the set-up. I argue that the seeming…Read more
  •  128
    This section is a discussion of Joseph Raz's Conception of Normativity introduced by Georgios Pavlakos
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