The City University Of New York Graduate Center
Department Of Philosophy
Alumnus
APA Central Division
CV
Auburn Hills and Rochester Hills, Michigan, United States
  •  1810
    Agency and responsibility
    Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (2): 199-207. 2010.
    According to Christine Korsgaard, Kantian hypothetical and categorical imperative principles are constitutive principles of agency. By acting in a way that is guided by these imperatives, an individual makes herself into an agent. There is hence, on her theory, an inextricable link between the nature of agency and the practical issue of why we should be rational and moral. The benefits of such an account would be great: in Korsgaard’s view, an account that bases morality on the nature of agency …Read more
  •  1270
    Linguistics, Psychology, and the Ontology of Language
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (3): 291-301. 2009.
    Noam Chomsky’s well-known claim that linguistics is a “branch of cognitive psychology” has generated a great deal of dissent—not from linguists or psychologists, but from philosophers. Jerrold Katz, Scott Soames, Michael Devitt, and Kim Sterelny have presented a number of arguments, intended to show that this Chomskian hypothesis is incorrect. On both sides of this debate, two distinct issues are often conflated: (1) the ontological status of language and (2) the relation between psychology and …Read more
  •  876
    Beyond Objectivism and Subjectivism
    In Piotr Makowski, Mateusz Bonecki & Krzysztof Nowak-Posadzy (eds.), Praxiology and the Reasons for Action, Transaction Publishers. 2016.
    Subjectivism about reasons is the view that a person has a reason to perform act A if she has some motivation to do A, or would have motivation to do A in certain circumstances. In On What Matters, Derek Parfit presents a series of arguments against subjectivism about reasons. In Parfit’s view, if subjectivism were true, nothing would actually matter. Parfit contends that there are only two positions regarding reasons: objectivism and subjectivism. I will argue for an inclusive position on reaso…Read more
  •  798
    Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Sense, Reference, and Philosophy
  •  781
    Why Language Exists
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 12 (1): 1-12. 2012.
    There are words. There are sentences. There are languages. Commonsense linguistic realism is the conjunction of the three preceding claims. Linguists and philosophers including Noam Chomsky (1986, 2000), Georges Rey (2006, 2008), and Barry C. Smith (2006) have presented skeptical doubts regarding the existence of linguistic entities. These doubts provide no good reason to deny commonsense linguistic realism. Some skeptical doubts are in fact not directed at the metaphysical thesis of commonsense…Read more
  •  700
    Minimalism and Expressivism
    Ethics in Progress 3 9-30. 2012.
    There has been a great deal of discussion in the recent philosophical literature of the relationship between the minimalist theory of truth and the expressivist metaethical theory. One group of philosophers contends that minimalism and expressivism are compatible, the other group contends that such theories are incompatible. Following Simon Blackburn (manuscript), I will call the former position ‘compatibilism’ and the latter position ‘incompatiblism.’ Even those compatibilist philosophers who h…Read more
  •  627
    The Self Beyond Itself is a defense of an incompatibilist, hard determinist view of free will. Free will is here defined in a very strong sense, as the existence of actions that do not result from any causes other than the agent herself. The question of how to define free will, especially whether it consists in the ability to do otherwise, and what the ability to do otherwise amounts to, is not given much consideration in this book.Ravven frames her work in a broad historical context. The kind o…Read more
  •  548
    R.C. Pradhan claims in Language, Reality, and Transcendence that, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, “[i]n no case is Wittgenstein interested in the empirical facts regarding language, as for him philosophy does not undertake any scientific study of language” (Pradhan 2009, xiv). I consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s purportedly anti-scientific and anti-empirical approach to language in light of advances by philosophers and linguists in the latte…Read more
  •  519
    Book review (review)
    Journal of Value Inquiry 40 (4): 485-488. 2006.
    Review of The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, edited by David Copp
  •  455
    Cooperation and Its Evolution (review)
    Philosophical Psychology 28 (8): 1253-1255. 2015.
    Review of Cooperation and its Evolution, edited by Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott, and Ben Fraser.
  •  453
    AI, alignment, and the categorical imperative
    AI and Ethics 3 337-344. 2023.
    Tae Wan Kim, John Hooker, and Thomas Donaldson make an attempt, in recent articles, to solve the alignment problem. As they define the alignment problem, it is the issue of how to give AI systems moral intelligence. They contend that one might program machines with a version of Kantian ethics cast in deontic modal logic. On their view, machines can be aligned with human values if such machines obey principles of universalization and autonomy, as well as a deontic utilitarian principle. Programmi…Read more
  •  401
    Truth and realism – Patrick Greenough and Michael P. Lynch (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 58 (230). 2008.
    Review of Truth and Realism, edited by Patrick Greenough and Michael Lynch
  •  394
    Christine M. Korsgaard, the constitution of agency (review)
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2): 235-236. 2010.
    Review of Christine Korsgaard, The Constitution of Agency
  •  359
    A Deflationary Metaphysics of Morality
    Acta Analytica 25 (3): 285-298. 2010.
    The metaphysical dispute between moral realists and antirealists is cast in terms of properties: the realist holds that moral properties exist, the antirealist denies this claim. There is a longstanding philosophical dispute over the nature of properties, and the obscurity of properties may make the realist/antirealist dispute even more obscure. In the spirit of deflationary theories of truth, we can turn to a deflationary theory of properties in order to clarify this issue. One might reasonably…Read more
  •  318
    Metafizički minimalizam
    Prolegomena 10 (1): 39-52. 2011.
    Properties and facts play a central role within metaphysics, yet there is no widely accepted account of what constitutes a property or a fact. Traditional conceptions of these metaphysical notions raise serious philosophical puzzles, making the existence of each seem dubious. Drawing on the minimalist theory of truth, I argue in favor of a minimalist conception of properties and facts. A minimalist theory of properties and facts explains these matters in terms of the acceptance of trivial schema…Read more
  •  292
    Review of Korsgaard's The Constitution of Agency (2008, OUP) (review)
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. forthcoming.
  •  270
    Synchronous Online Philosophy Courses: An Experiment in Progress
    APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 18 (1): 37-40. 2018.
    There are two main ways to teach a course online: synchronously or asynchronously. In an asynchronous course, students can log on at their convenience and do the course work. In a synchronous course, there is a requirement that all students be online at specific times, to allow for a shared course environment. In this article, the author discusses the strengths and weaknesses of synchronous online learning for the teaching of undergraduate philosophy courses. The author discusses specific strate…Read more
  •  225
    Review of New Waves in Metaethics, edited by Michael Brady; and New Waves in Truth, edited by Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen
  •  216
    Does Moral Discourse Require Robust Truth?
    Logos Architekton 3. 2009.
    It has been argued by several philosophers that a deflationary conception of truth, unlike more robust conceptions of truth, cannot properly account for the nature of moral discourse. This is due to what I will call the “quick route problem”: There is a quick route from any deflationary theory of truth and certain obvious features of moral practice to the attribution of truth to moral utterances. The standard responses to the quick route problem are either to urge accepting a conception of truth…Read more
  •  171
    Metaphysical Minimalism
    Prolegomena 10 (1): 39-52. 2011.
    Properties and facts play a central role within metaphysics, yet there is no widely accepted account of what constitutes a property or a fact. Traditional conceptions of these metaphysical notions raise serious philosophical puzzles, making the existence of each seem dubious. Drawing on the minimalist theory of truth, I argue in favor of a minimalist conception of properties and facts. A minimalist theory of properties and facts explains these matters in terms of the acceptance of trivial schema…Read more
  •  110
    The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality: Building Worlds, written by Erick Jose Ramirez (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 20 (5-6): 592-595. 2023.
    Review of The Ethics of Virtual and Augmented Reality: Building Worlds, written by Erick Jose Ramirez
  •  39
    Worlds of truth: A philosophy of knowledge by Israel Scheffler (review)
    Analysis 70 (2): 383-385. 2010.
    (No abstract is available for this citation)
  •  24
    Marcus Arvan. Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory. Reviewed by (review)
    Philosophy in Review 37 (2): 44-46. 2017.
    Review of Marcus Arvan, Rightness as Fairness
  •  4
    Rawls, Truth, and Minimalism
    Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 79 (3): 1131-1142. 2023.
    The expressivist theory in metaethics has a historical lineage dating back to the work of the great philosopher David Hume. Among the major metaethical alternatives to expressivism are constructivist theories, theories that have an origin in the work of another great philosopher, Immanuel Kant. One of the best-known and most influential recent formulations of such a view is due to John Rawls. There has been a great deal of discussion of the relationship between expressivism and deflationary theo…Read more