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562Social Identities and Transformative ExperienceRes Philosophica 92 (2): 171-187. 2015.In this paper, I argue that whether, how, and to what extent an experience is transformative is often highly contingent. I then further argue that sometimes social conditions are a major factor in whether a certain type of experience is often or typically transformative. Sometimes social conditions make it easy for a type of experience to be transformative, and sometimes they make it hard for a type of experience to be transformative. This, I claim, can sometimes be a matter of social justice: s…Read more
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36Notes on theIn Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. 2009.
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191What You Can Expect When You Don't Want to be ExpectingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3): 775-786. 2015.
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1476Trust, Distrust, and ‘Medical Gaslighting’Philosophical Quarterly 73 (3): 649-676. 2023.When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they’re the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates—gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to adjudicate, and seems prone to over-application. In…Read more
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37Current Controversies in Metaphysics (edited book)Routledge. 2014.First published in 2014. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company
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1839Gender without Gender Identity: The Case of Cognitive DisabilityMind 131 (523): 836-862. 2022.What gender are you? And in virtue of what? These are questions of gender categorization. Such questions are increasingly at the core of many contemporary debat.
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276Response to EklundOxford Studies in Metaphysics 6. 2011.This chapter defends the account of metaphysical indeterminacy of Barnes and Williams against Eklund's objections.
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630Categories We Live by: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories, by Ásta (review)Mind 129 (515): 939-947. 2020.Categories We Live by: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories, by Ásta. Oxford: OUP, 2018. Pp. 160.
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976Symmetric DependenceIn Ricki Bliss & Graham Priest (eds.), Reality and its Structure: Essays in Fundamentality, Oxford University Press. pp. 50-69. 2018.Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non- symmetric, rather than asymmetric. If we give up the asymmetry of dependence, interesting things follow for what we can say about metaphysical explanation— particularly for the prospects of explanatory holism.
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5977Gender and Gender TermsNoûs 54 (3): 704-730. 2019.Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.
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156Against impairment: replies to Aas, Howard, and FrancisPhilosophical Studies 175 (5): 1151-1162. 2018.AbstrctSean Aas, Dana Howard, and Leslie Francis raise compelling and interesting objections to the definition of disability I defend in The Minority Body. In this paper, I reply to these objections and elaborate on my criticisms of the disability/impairment distinction.
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765Vague parts and vague identityPacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2): 176-187. 2009.We discuss arguments against the thesis that the world itself can be vague. The first section of the paper distinguishes dialectically effective from ineffective arguments against metaphysical vagueness. The second section constructs an argument against metaphysical vagueness that promises to be of the dialectically effective sort: an argument against objects with vague parts. Firstly, cases of vague parthood commit one to cases of vague identity. But we argue that Evans' famous argument against…Read more
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495Going Beyond the Fundamental: Feminism in Contemporary MetaphysicsProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (3pt3): 335-351. 2014.Much recent literature in metaphysics attempts to answer the question, ‘What is metaphysics?’ In this paper I argue that many of the most influential contemporary answers to this question yield the result that feminist metaphysics is not metaphysics. I further argue this result is problematic
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728Valuing Disability, Causing DisabilityEthics 125 (1): 88-113. 2014.Disability rights activists often claim that disability is not—by itself—something that makes disabled people worse off. A popular objection to such a view of disability is this: were it correct, it would make it permissible to cause disability and impermissible to cause nondisability. The aim of this article is to show that these twin objections don’t succeed
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1677Realism and social structurePhilosophical Studies 174 (10): 2417-2433. 2017.Social constructionism is often considered a form of anti-realism. But in contemporary feminist philosophy, an increasing number of philosophers defend views that are well-described as both realist and social constructionist. In this paper, I use the work of Sally Haslanger as an example of realist social constructionism. I argue: that Haslanger is best interpreted as defending metaphysical realism about social structures; that this type of metaphysical realism about the social world presents ch…Read more
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318Back to the open futurePhilosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 1-26. 2011.Many of us are tempted by the thought that the future is open, whereas the past is not. The future might unfold one way, or it might unfold another; but the past, having occurred, is now settled. In previous work we presented an account of what openness consists in: roughly, that the openness of the future is a matter of it being metaphysically indeterminate how things will turn out to be. We were previously concerned merely with presenting the view and exploring its consequences; we did not att…Read more
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953The open future: bivalence, determinism and ontologyPhilosophical Studies 146 (2): 291-309. 2008.In this paper we aim to disentangle the thesis that the future is open from theses that often get associated or even conflated with it. In particular, we argue that the open future thesis is compatible with both the unrestricted principle of bivalence and determinism with respect to the laws of nature. We also argue that whether or not the future (and indeed the past) is open has no consequences as to the existence of (past and) future ontology.
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230Indeterminacy, identity and counterparts: Evans reconsideredSynthese 168 (1). 2009.In this paper I argue that Gareth Evans’ famous proof of the impossibility of de re indeterminate identity fails on a counterpart-theoretic interpretation of the determinacy operators. I attempt to motivate a counterpart-theoretic reading of the determinacy operators and then show that, understood counterpart-theoretically, Evans’ argument is straightforwardly invalid.
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149Review of David Chalmers, David Manley, Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (10). 2009.
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2VaguenessIn Robin Le Poidevin, Simons Peter, McGonigal Andrew & Ross P. Cameron (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. 2009.
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242Metaphysically indeterminate existencePhilosophical Studies 166 (3): 495-510. 2013.Sider (Four-dimensionalism 2001; Philos Stud 114:135–146, 2003; Nous 43:557–567, 2009) has developed an influential argument against indeterminacy in existence. In what follows, I argue that the defender of metaphysical forms of indeterminate existence has a unique way of responding to Sider’s argument. The response I’ll offer is interesting not only for its applicability to Sider’s argument, but also for its broader implications; responding to Sider helps to show both how we should think about …Read more
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738Emergence and FundamentalityMind 121 (484): 873-901. 2012.In this paper, I argue for a new way of characterizing ontological emergence. I appeal to recent discussions in meta-ontology regarding fundamentality and dependence, and show how emergence can be simply and straightforwardly characterized using these notions. I then argue that many of the standard problems for emergence do not apply to this account: given a clearly specified meta-ontological background, emergence becomes much easier to explicate. If my arguments are successful, they show both a…Read more
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172A critical study of John Heil's 'from an ontological point of view'SWIF Philosophy of Mind Review. 2007.Metaphysicians eager to engage with substantive, thoughtful, and provocative issues will be happy with John Heil’s From an Ontological Point of View. The book represents not only a sustained defence of a specific metaphysical theory, but also of a specific way of doing metaphysics. Put ontology first, Heil urges us, in order to remember that the original fascination of metaphysics wasn’t the question ‘what must the world be like in order to correspond neatly to our use of language?’, but rather …Read more
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951Reply to Guy Kahane and Julian SavulescuRes Philosophica 93 (1): 295-309. 2016.Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu respond to my paper “Valuing Disability, Causing Disability” by arguing that my assessment of objections to the mere-difference view of disability is unconvincing and fails to explain their conviction that it is impermissible to cause disability. In reply, I argue that their response misconstrues, somewhat radically, both what I say in my paper and the commitments of the mere-difference view more generally. It also fails to adequately appreciate the unique epistem…Read more
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399Disability, minority, and differenceJournal of Applied Philosophy 26 (4): 337-355. 2009.abstract In this paper I develop a characterization of disability according to which disability is in no way a sub-optimal feature. I argue, however, that this conception of disability is compatible with the idea that having a disability is, at least in a restricted sense, a harm. I then go on to argue that construing disability in this way avoids many of the common objections levelled at accounts which claim that disability is not a negative feature.
University of St. Andrews
PhD, 2007
Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |