New York University
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Berkeley, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mind
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mind
PhilPapers Editorships
The Value of Consciousness
  •  1265
    I give an account of the difference between "Holistic" and "Atomistic" views of conscious experience. On the Holistic view, we enjoy a unified "field" of awareness, whose parts are mere modifications of the whole, and therefore owe their existence to the whole. There is some tendency to saddle those who reject the Holistic field model with a (perhaps) implausible "building block" view. I distinguish a number of different theses about the parts of an experience that are suggested by the "building…Read more
  •  1116
    I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined vi…Read more
  •  908
    The experience of left and right
    In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual Experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.
  •  578
    Explaining away temporal flow – thoughts on Prosser’s ‘Experiencing Time’
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3): 315-327. 2018.
    I offer some responses to Prosser’s ‘Experiencing Time’, one of whose goals is to debunk a view of temporal experience somewhat prevalent in the metaphysics literature, which I call ‘Perceptualism’. According to Perceptualism: it is part of the content of perceptual experience that time passes in a metaphysically strong sense: the present has a metaphysically privileged status, and time passes in virtue of changes in which events this ‘objective present’ highlights, and moreover this gives us ev…Read more
  •  387
    Consciousness in a space-time world
    Philosophical Perspectives 21 (1). 2007.
  •  169
    Selfless experience
    Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 207-243. 2017.
  •  95
    Does Experience Have Phenomenal Properties?
    Philosophical Topics 44 (2): 201-230. 2016.
    What assumptions are built into the claim that experience has “phenomenal properties,” and could these assumptions turn out to be false? I consider the issue specifically for the similarity relations between experiences: for example, experiences of different shades of red are more similar to each other than an experience of red and an experience of green. It is commonly thought that we have a special kind of epistemic access to experience that is more secure than our access to the external envir…Read more
  •  83
  •  75
    The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience (review)
    Philosophical Review 124 (1): 163-167. 2015.
  •  44
    Representing Probability in Perception and Experience
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4): 907-945. 2022.
    It is increasingly common in cognitive science and philosophy of perception to regard perceptual processing as a probabilistic engine, taking into account uncertainty in computing representations of the distal environment. Models of this kind often postulate probabilistic representations, or what we will call probabilistic states,. These are states that in some sense mark or represent information about the probabilities of distal conditions. It has also been argued that perceptual experience its…Read more
  •  28
    Against Magnitude Realism
    Critica 55 (163): 13-44. 2023.
    In recent work, Christopher Peacocke has argued for a kind of realism (or anti-reductionism) about magnitudes such as temperature and spatial distance. Peacocke’s argument is that magnitudes are an ineliminable commitment of scientific and everyday explanations (including high-level explanations), and that they are the natural candidates for semantic values of our ordinary magnitude talk, and for contents of our mental states. I critique these arguments, in particular focusing on whether the rea…Read more
  •  2
    Overview of some of the key philosophical problems encountered making sense of the notion of "subjective time", with a focus on the experience of duration. The paper unpacks some of the assumptions behind an intuitive picture of duration experience I call the "simple flow" view, highlighting the availability of alternative models. It then considers a number of obstacles to providing an account of the individuation of subjective features of duration experience.
  • The experience of left and right
    In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.
  • The Importance of Being Conscious (edited book)
    with Adam Pautz
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.