-
Believers and Citizens: Religious Freedom in a Deliberative DemocracyDissertation, The University of Connecticut. 2001.A deliberative democracy is a society committed to the ideal of reasoned political deliberation as the source of legitimate laws and policies. Recently, the role that citizens' religious convictions should play in political deliberation has been the subject of much philosophical debate. I enter this debate by rejecting the claim that participants in political deliberations must refrain from basing their political proposals on their religious convictions. I argue that citizens and legislators may…Read more
-
15The purpose of this project is to advance the thesis that the notion of an appropriative self, reconstructed from the philosophy of William James, answers, in part, the concerns outlined in the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Initially I focus on explicating Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis, that ideological consciousness is the product of the dialectic of enlightenment. According to their view, culture is a reconciliation of the ego's impulse to persist and regress. Only …Read more
-
Hybridization as an evolutionary stimulusIn Francisco José Ayala & John C. Avise (eds.), Essential readings in evolutionary biology, The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014.
-
5Sailing the Seas of CheeseIn Max Ryynänen & Paco Barragán (eds.), The Changing Meaning of Kitsch: From Rejection to Acceptance, Palgrave / Macmillan (springer Verlag). pp. 87-117. 2023.Memphis Elvis is cool; Vegas Elvis is cheesy. How come? To call something cheesy is, ostensibly, to disparage it, and yet cheesy acts are some of the most popular in popular culture today. How is this possible? The concepts of cheese, cheesy, and cheesiness play an important and increasingly ubiquitous role in popular culture today. I offer an analysis of these concepts, distinguishing them from nearby concepts like kitschy and campy. Along the way I draw attention to the important roles of cult…Read more
-
81Countering MacKinnon on Rape and ConsentSocial Philosophy Today 38 17-32. 2022.Feminists are divided on whether consent should be employed in legal definitions of rape. Catharine MacKinnon has criticized the usefulness of consent in enabling legal systems to recognize and prosecute instances of rape (MacKinnon 1989, 2005, 2016). In a recent article in this journal, Lisa H. Schwartzman defends the use of affirmative consent in rape law against MacKinnon’s critique (Schwartzman 2019). In contrast to MacKinnon, Schwartzman claims our understanding of rape must include both fo…Read more
-
224In a Silent WayJournal of Aesthetics and Culture 12 (1). 2020.I argue that silence is replete with aesthetic character and that it can be a rewarding object of aesthetic appreciation, assessment, and appraisal. The appreciation of silence might initially seem impossible, for, it might seem, there is nothing there to behold. Taking up this challenge, I attempt to dispel the sense of paradox. I contend that, despite our never actually experiencing absolute silence, there is much to enjoy in the silences that we do experience. I go on to argue that proper app…Read more
-
153Sailing the Seas of CheeseContemporary Aesthetics 8. 2010.Memphis Elvis is cool; Vegas Elvis is cheesy. How come? To call something cheesy is, ostensibly, to disparage it, and yet cheesy acts are some of the most popular in popular culture today. How is this possible? The concepts of cheese, cheesy, and cheesiness play an important and increasingly ubiquitous role in popular culture today. I offer an analysis of these concepts, distinguishing them from nearby concepts like kitchy and campy. Along the way I draw attention to the important roles of cultu…Read more
-
191Aesthetic Appreciation of SilenceContemporary Aesthetics 18. 2020.We enjoy sounds. What about silence: the absence of sound? Certainly not all, but surely many of us seek out, attend to, and appreciate silence. But, if nothing is there, then there is nothing to possess aesthetic qualities that might engage aesthetic interest or reward aesthetic attention. This is at least puzzling, perhaps even paradoxical. In this paper, I attempt to dispel the sense of paradox and provide a way to understand aesthetic appreciation of silence. I argue that silence can have an…Read more
-
54Deliberative Sincerity and the Opacity of the SelfJournal of Social Philosophy 51 (3): 422-440. 2020.Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
-
7Reading Dewey (review)Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 29 (90): 19-20. 2001.
-
191Ethics Commands, Aesthetics DemandsEnvironmental Philosophy 7 (2): 115-133. 2010.I identify a commonly held position in environmental philosophy, “the received view,” and argue that its proponents beg the question when challenged to demonstrate the relevance of environmental aesthetics for environmental justice. I call this “the inference problem,” and I go on to argue that an alternative to the received view, Arnold Berleant’s participatory engagement model, is better equipped to meet the challenge it poses. By adopting an alternative metaphysics, the engagement model suppl…Read more
-
1The Modal Status of Natural LawsDissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder. 1997.According to a popular realist conception, the laws of nature not only describe, but indeed govern what happens in the empirical world. Thus, according to this view, laws are "modally stronger" than mere contingent, empirical regularities. At the same time, this conception has it that the laws of nature could have been other than they actually are. Thus, according to this view, laws are "modally weaker" than logical necessities. As such, this view of laws, which I call the Weak Thesis, requires …Read more
-
29Scientific Essentialism, Could’ve Done Otherwise, and the Possibility of FreedomProceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 15 13-20. 2008.Philosophers concerned with the problem of freedom and determinism differ strikingly over the analysis of the concept of human freedom of the will. Compatibilists and incompatibilists, determinists and indeterminists populate the conceptual landscape with a dizzying array of theories differing in complex and subtle ways. Each of these analyses faces an under-appreciated potential challenge: the challenge from scientific essentialism. Might all traditional analyses of freedom of the will be radic…Read more
-
25Reading Dewey (review)Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 29 (90): 19-20. 2001.
-
48Who's afraid of corporate culture: The Barnett Newman controversyJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (1): 49-57. 1993.
-
68Kant, Natural Kind Terms, and Scientific EssentialismHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (4). 1994.What, for Kant, is the semantic status of the proposition: Water is H2O? Is it analytic or synthetic? The question is not one of merely esoteric import since an answer to it would constitute a statement about the meaningfulness of all our scientific propositions. And, insofar as the Critique is a defense of the possibility of the natural sciences, it seems that we should be able to find in it the answer to our question. Further, we should be able to find an answer to the question of whether or n…Read more
-
35Religiously Conservative Citizens and the Ideal of Conscientious Engagement: A Comment on Wolterstorff and EberlePhilosophia 41 (2): 411-427. 2013.Nicholas Wolterstorff and Christopher J. Eberle have defended the view that the ethics of liberal citizenship allows citizens to publicly support the passage of coercive laws based solely on their religious convictions. They also develop positive conceptions of virtuous citizenship that place moral limits on how citizens may appeal to their religion. The question I address in this essay is whether the limits they impose on citizens’ appeals to their religion are adequate. Since Eberle’s “ideal o…Read more
-
63Dispositional essentialism; alive and wellPhilosophical Papers 26 (2): 195-201. 1997.Within the community of philosophers who advocate a broadly realist picture of laws of nature, there remains a vexed question about truthmakers: What is it that makes statements of natural law true? One view has it that the laws of a world are true in virtue of the fact that there exist ultimate dispositions or powers at that world. Following Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, I call this view 'Dispositional Essentialism,' and I defend it against a recent attack from Stephen Mumford who prefers th…Read more
-
12
-
39How General is Generalized Scientific Essentialism?Synthese 144 (3): 373-379. 2005.I look at a recent argument offered in defense of a doctrine which I will call generalized scientific essentialism. This is the doctrine according to which, not only are some facts about substance composition metaphysically necessary, but, in addition, some facts about substance behavior are metaphysically necessary. More specifically, so goes the argument, not only is water necessarily composed of H2O and salt is necessarily composed of NaCl, but, in addition, salt necessarily dissolves in wa…Read more
-
132A Defense of the 'Sterility Objection' to the New Natural Lawyers' Argument Against Same-Sex MarriageEthical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (4): 759-775. 2013.The “new natural lawyers” (NNLs) are a prolific group of philosophers, theologians, and political theorists that includes John Finnis, Robert George, Patrick Lee, Gerard Bradley, and Germain Grisez, among others. These thinkers have devoted themselves to developing and defending a traditional sexual ethic according to which homosexual sexual acts are immoral per se and marriage ought to remain an exclusively heterosexual institution. The sterility objection holds that the NNLs are guilty of maki…Read more