•  1959
    Aesthetic Rationality
    Journal of Philosophy 115 (3): 113-140. 2018.
    We argue that the aesthetic domain falls inside the scope of rationality, but does so in its own way. Aesthetic judgment is a stance neither on whether a proposition is to be believed nor on whether an action is to be done, but on whether an object is to be appreciated. Aesthetic judgment is simply appreciation. Correlatively, reasons supporting theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments operate in fundamentally different ways. The irreducibility of the aesthetic domain is due to the fact th…Read more
  •  1104
    Inference as Consciousness of Necessity
    Analytic Philosophy 61 (4): 304-322. 2020.
    Consider the following three claims. (i) There are no truths of the form ‘p and ~p’. (ii) No one holds a belief of the form ‘p and ~p’. (iii) No one holds any pairs of beliefs of the form {p, ~p}. Irad Kimhi has recently argued, in effect, that each of these claims holds and holds with metaphysical necessity. Furthermore, he maintains that they are ultimately not distinct claims at all, but the same claim formulated in different ways. I find his argument suggestive, if not entirely transp…Read more
  •  978
    Reconciling Practical Knowledge with Self-Deception
    Mind 128 (512): 1205-1225. 2019.
    Is it impossible for a person to do something intentionally without knowing that she is doing it? The phenomenon of self-deceived agency might seem to show otherwise. Here the agent is not lying, yet disavows a correct description of her intentional action. This disavowal might seem expressive of ignorance. However, I show that the self-deceived agent does know what she's doing. I argue that we should understand the factors that explain self-deception as masking rather than negating the practica…Read more
  •  910
    Aesthetic knowledge
    Philosophical Studies 179 (8): 2507-2535. 2022.
    What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But perception is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Most say “yes”. But this is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. The ultimate …Read more
  •  908
    Assertion and transparent self-knowledge
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (7): 873-889. 2019.
    We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one’s own do…Read more
  •  726
    To Believe is to Know that You Believe
    Dialectica 70 (3): 375-405. 2016.
    Most agree that believing a proposition normally or ideally results in believing that one believes it, at least if one considers the question of whether one believes it. I defend a much stronger thesis. It is impossible to believe without knowledge of one's belief. I argue, roughly, as follows. Believing that p entails that one is able to honestly assert that p. But anyone who is able to honestly assert that p is also able to just say – i.e., authoritatively, yet not on the basis of evidence – t…Read more
  •  665
    According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action that accep…Read more
  •  575
    Why There Are No Token States
    Journal of Philosophical Research 34 215-241. 2009.
    The thesis that mental states are physical states enjoys widespread popularity. After the abandonment of typeidentity theories, however, this thesis has typically been framed in terms of state tokens. I argue that token states are a philosopher’s fiction, and that debates about the identity of mental and physical state tokens thus rest on a mistake
  •  547
    Anscombe and The Difference Rationality Makes
    In Adrian Haddock & Rachael Wiseman (eds.), The Anscombean Mind, Routledge. 2022.
    Anscombe famously argues that to act intentionally is to act under a description, and that “it is the agent's knowledge of what he is doing that gives the descriptions under which what is going on is the execution of an intention.” Further, she takes ‘knows’ to mean that the agent can give these descriptions herself. It would seem to follow that animals cannot act intentionally. However, she denies this, insisting that although animals cannot express intentions, they can have them. But how c…Read more
  •  479
    Why zombies are inconceivable
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3): 477-90. 2004.
    I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they _must_ involve first-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, _cannot_. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have unwittingly conflated imagining a creature who lacks consciousness with imagining a creature witho…Read more
  •  456
    Mental causation: Unnaturalized but not unnatural
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (1): 57-83. 2001.
    If a woman in the audience at a presentation raises her hand, we would take this as evidence that she intends to ask a question. In normal circumstances, we would be right to say that she raises her hand because she intends to ask a question. We also expect that there could, in principle, be a causal explanation of her hand’s rising in purely physiological terms. Ordinarily, we take the existence and compatibility of both kinds of causes for granted. But this can come to seem strange. When we im…Read more
  •  452
    Wanting and willing
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 887-899. 2020.
    How homogenous are the sources of human motivation? Textbook Humeans hold that every human action is motivated by desire, thus any heterogeneity derives from differing objects of desire. Textbook Kantians hold that although some human actions are motivated by desire, others are motivated by reason. One question in this vicinity concerns whether there are states such that to be in one is at once take the world to be a certain way and to be motivated to act: the state-question. My question her…Read more
  •  333
    Mental causation in a physical world
    Philosophical Studies 122 (1): 27-50. 2005.
    <b> </b>Abstract: It is generally accepted that the most serious threat to the possibility of mental causation is posed by the causal self-sufficiency of physical causal processes. I argue, however, that this feature of the world, which I articulate in principle I call Completeness, in fact poses no genuine threat to mental causation. Some find Completeness threatening to mental causation because they confuse it with a stronger principle, which I call Closure. Others do not simply conflate Compl…Read more
  •  277
  •  255
    Summary
    Analysis 73 (3): 499-501. 2013.
  •  245
    Two principles are central to Rational Causation. Causalism: Believing and acting for a reason are causal phenomena in the sense that there is in both domains a causal connection between ground and grounded. Equivalence: There is a necessary connection between something's being the reason why I believe or act and my taking it to favour the belief or action. Kieran Setiya argues that Causalism is false in the theoretical case and that Equivalence is false in the practical case. I reply to these a…Read more
  •  207
    Events, Sortals, and the Mind–Body Problem
    Synthese 150 (1): 99-129. 2006.
    In recent decades, a view of identity I call Sortalism has gained popularity. According to this view, if a is identical to b, then there is some sortal S such that a is the same S as b. Sortalism has typically been discussed with respect to the identity of objects. I argue that the motivations for Sortalism about object-identity apply equally well to event-identity. But Sortalism about event-identity poses a serious threat to the view that mental events are token identical to physical events: A …Read more
  •  189
    'Belief' and Belief
    European Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Our interest in understanding belief stems partly from our being creatures who think. However, the term ‘belief’ is used to refer to many states: from the fully conscious rational state that partly constitutes knowledge to the fanciful states of alarm clocks. Which of the many ‘belief’ states must a theory of belief be answerable to? This is the scope question. I begin my answer with a reply to a recent argument that belief is invariably weak, i.e., that the evidential standards that are req…Read more
  •  181
    Knowing what you Want
    In Lucy Campbell (ed.), Forms of Knowledge, Oxford. forthcoming.
    How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of desire is distinctive in…Read more
  •  153
    Intentionalism and the imaginability of the inverted spectrum
    Philosophical Quarterly 56 (224): 321-339. 2006.
    There has been much written in recent years about whether a pair of subjects could have visual experiences that represented the colors of objects in their environment in precisely the same way, despite differing significantly in what it was like to undergo them, differing that is, in their qualitative character. The possibility of spectrum inversion has been so much debated1 in large part because of the threat that it would pose to the more general doctrine of Intentionalism, according to which …Read more
  •  123
    Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    It is impossible to hold patently contradictory beliefs in mind together at once. Why? Because we know that it is impossible for both to be true. This impossibility is a species of rational necessity, a phenomenon that uniquely characterizes the relation between one person's beliefs. Here, Eric Marcus argues that the unity of the rational mind--what makes it one mind--is what explains why, given what we already believe, we can't believe certain things and must believe certain others in this spec…Read more
  •  115
    The Space of Reasons as Self-Consciousness
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In reasoning, we draw conclusions from multiple premises. But thinkers can be fragmented. And if there is no single fragment of the agent that thinks all of the premises, then the agent cannot draw any conclusions from them. It follows that reasoning from multiple premises depends on their being thought together. But what is it to think premises together? What is the condition that contrasts with fragmentation? This paper provides an answer to this question that is simple but compelling: to…Read more
  •  105
    Life and Action (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4): 749-751. 2010.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  39
    On the Sortal Dependence of Event Identity
    Southwest Philosophy Review 16 (1): 83-89. 2000.
  • Mental Causation: Natural, but Not Naturalized
    Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1999.
    The task of assessing the relationship between the manifest and scientific images of the world is particularly troublesome in the philosophy of mind. For we have a great stake in maintaining our common-sense understanding of ourselves. It has appeared to many, however, as if the causal claims implicit in our everyday explanations of human behavior are incompatible with the descriptions of human beings provided by the natural sciences. One source of this appearance of incompatibility has yet to b…Read more