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511Social 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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29Notes on theIn Robin Le Poidevin (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, Routledge. 2009.
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181What You Can Expect When You Don't Want to be ExpectingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (3): 775-786. 2015.
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1221Trust, 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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29Current 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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1590Gender 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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226Response 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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580Categories 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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883Symmetric 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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5645Gender 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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147Against 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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710Vague 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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140Review 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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230Metaphysically 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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718Emergence 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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167A 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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887Reply 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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384Disability, 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.
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168Vagueness and arbitrariness: Merricks on compositionMind 116 (461): 105-113. 2007.In this paper I respond to Trenton Merricks's (2005) paper ‘Composition and Vagueness’. I argue that Merricks's paper faces the following difficulty: he claims to provide independent motivation for denying one of the premisses of the Lewis-Sider vagueness argument for unrestricted composition, but the alleged motivation he provides begs the question.
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579Ontic Vagueness: A Guide for the PerplexedNoûs 44 (4): 601-627. 2010.In this paper I develop a framework for understanding ontic vagueness. The project of the paper is two-fold. I first outline a definitional account of ontic vagueness – one that I think is an improvement on previous attempts because it remains neutral on other, independent metaphysical issues. I then develop one potential manifestation of that basic definitional structure. This is a more robust (and much less neutral) account which gives a fully classical explication of ontic vagueness via modal…Read more
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228Arguments Against Metaphysical Indeterminacy and VaguenessPhilosophy Compass 5 (11): 953-964. 2010.In this article, I survey some of the major arguments against metaphysical indeterminacy and vagueness and outline potential responses.
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1421A Theory of Metaphysical IndeterminacyIn Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 6, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 103-148. 2011.If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.
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143The Minority Body: A Theory of DisabilityOxford University Press. 2016.Disability is primarily a social phenomenon -- a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. This is how disability is understood in the Disability Rights and Disability Pride movements; but there is a massive disconnect with the way disability is typically viewed within analytic philosophy. The idea that disability is not inherently bad or sub-optimal is one that many philosophers treat with open skepticism, and somet…Read more
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475Going 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
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 |