•  50
    Evidence and Religious Belief. Edited by Kelly James Clark, Raymond J. VanArragon (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 63 (253): 811-813. 2013.
    © 2013 The Editors of The Philosophical QuarterlyThe volume that Kelly James Clark and Raymond J. VanArragon have put together is excellent. The question about evidence for religious belief has been raised in recent times particularly within Reformed epistemology, and the authors writing in this volume face these issues with vigorous and persuasive arguments. The book includes eleven essays, and is divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to exploring whether religious belief needs to…Read more
  •  34
    Evidence and Religious Belief (review)
    Dialogue 52 (1): 198-204. 2013.
  •  133
    Consciousness and the Nonexistence of God
    Journal of Philosophical Research 38 1-25. 2013.
    According to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic theological tradition, or "classical theism," disembodiment (or non-physicality) and psychologicality are two of God’s necessary or essential attributes. This paper mounts a case for the thesis that these attributes are incompatible. More exactly, it provides compelling evidentiary support for the claim that, given the basic structure of consciousness, it is impossible for a psychological being to be disembodied (and vice versa). But if it is impossible f…Read more
  •  144
    The representational theory of phenomenal character: A phenomenological critique
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5 (3-4): 321-339. 2006.
    According to a currently popular approach to the analysis of phenomenal character, the phenomenal character of an experience is entirely determined by, and is in fact identical with, the experience's representational content. Two underlying assumptions motivate this approach to phenomenal character: (1) that conscious experiences are diaphanous or transparent, in the sense that it is impossible to discern, via introspection, any intrinsic features of an experience of x that are not experienced a…Read more
  •  191
    Physicalists Have Nothing to Fear from Ghosts
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1): 91-104. 2012.
    It is well known that, according to some, philosophical reflection on zombies (i.e., bodies without minds) poses a problem for physicalism. But what about ghosts, i.e., minds without bodies? Does philosophical reflection on them pose a problem for physicalism? Descartes, of course, thought so, and lately rumours have been surfacing that has was right after all, that ghosts pose a problem for both a priori and a posteriori physicalism, and for any kind of physicalism in between. This paper argues…Read more
  •  120
    Bennett and Hacker on neural materialism
    Acta Analytica 23 (3): 273-286. 2008.
    In their recent book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, Max Bennett and Peter Hacker attack neural materialism (NM), the view, roughly, that mental states (events, processes, etc.) are identical with neural states or material properties of neural states (events, processes, etc.). Specifically, in the penultimate chapter entitled “Reductionism,” they argue that NM is unintelligible, that “there is no sense to literally identifying neural states and configurations with psychological attrib…Read more
  •  135
    Self-consciousness and phenomenal character
    Dialogue 44 (4): 707-733. 2005.
    This article defends two theses: that a mental state is conscious if and only if it has phenomenal character, i.e., if and only if there is something it is like for the subject to be in that state, and that all state consciousness involves self-consciousness, in the sense that a mental state is conscious if and only if its possessor is, in some suitable way, conscious of being in it. Though neither of these theses is novel, there is a dearth of direct arguments for them in the scholarly literatu…Read more
  •  173
    In Defense of the What-It-Is-Likeness of Experience
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (3): 271-293. 2011.
    It is common parlance among philosophers who inquire into the nature of consciousness to speak of there being something it is like for the subject of a mental state to be in it. The popularity of the ‘what-it-is-like’ phrase stems, in part, from the assumption that it enables us to distinguish, in an intuitive and illuminating way, between conscious and unconscious mental states: conscious mental states, unlike unconscious mental states, are such that there is something it is like for their subj…Read more
  •  83
    An Adverbialist–Objectualist Account of Pain
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12 (4): 859-876. 2013.
    Adverbialism, broadly construed, is the thesis that pains (and other sensations) are modes of awareness, and objectualism, broadly construed, is the thesis that pains are objects of awareness. Why are we inclined to say that pains are modes of awareness and yet also inclined to say that they are objects of awareness? Each inclination leads to an account of pain that seems to be incompatible with the other. If adverbialism is correct, it would seem that objectualism is mistaken (and vice versa). …Read more
  •  213
    Pascal’s Wager and the Nature of God
    Sophia 50 (3): 331-344. 2011.
    This paper argues that Pascal's formulation of his famous wager argument licenses an inference about God's nature that ultimately vitiates the claim that wagering for God is in one's rational self-interest. In particular, it is argued that if we accept Pascal's premises, then we can infer that the god for whom Pascal encourages us to wager is irrational. But if God is irrational, then the prudentially rational course of action is to refrain from wagering for him.
  •  672
    Critical Notice of Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 86 (1): 291-295. 2012.
  •  111
    Is God's Belief Requirement Rational?
    Religious Studies 47 (4): 465-478. 2011.
    This paper sketches an evidential atheological argument that can be answered only if one of the central tenets of some theistic traditions is rejected, namely, that (propositional) belief in God is a necessary condition for salvation. The basic structure of the argument is as follows. Under theism, God is essentially omniscient, but no one can be both omniscient and irrational. So, if there is reason to hold that God is irrational, then it would follow that God doesn’t exist. And there is re…Read more
  •  516
  •  141
    On Three Arguments against Endurantism
    Metaphysica 12 (2): 101-115. 2011.
    Judith Thomson, David Lewis, and Ted Sider have each formulated different arguments that apparently pose problems for our ordinary claims of diachronic sameness, i.e., claims in which we assert that familiar, concrete objects survive (or persist) through time by enduring as numerically the same entity despite minor changes in their intrinsic or relational properties. In this paper, I show that all three arguments fail in a rather obvious way--they beg the question--and so even though there may b…Read more
  •  108
    A Critique of the Right Intention Condition as an Element of Jus ad Bellum
    Journal of Military Ethics 15 (1): 36-57. 2016.
    According to just war theory, a resort to war is justified only if it satisfies the right intention condition. This article offers a critical examination of this condition, defending the thesis that, despite its venerable history as part of the just war tradition, it ought to be jettisoned. When properly understood, it turns out to be an unnecessary element of jus ad bellum, adding nothing essential to our assessments of the justice of armed conflict.
  •  114
    Review of Dan Zahavi's Subjectivity and Selfhood (review)
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 13. 2007.
    In Subjectivity and Selfhood Dan Zahavi presents the fruits of his thinking on a nexus of issues regarding the experiential structure of consciousness and its relation to selfhood. The central theme of the book is that the “notion of self is crucial for a proper understanding of consciousness, and consequently it is indispensable to a variety of disciplines such as philosophy of mind, social philosophy, psychiatry, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience”. Proceeding, as in his prev…Read more
  •  95
    Frankfurt Cases, Alternate Possibilities, and Prior Signs
    Erkenntnis 78 (5): 1037-1049. 2013.
    In his seminal paper ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, Harry Frankfurt argues against the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP)—the principle that persons are morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise—by presenting a case in which, apparently, a person is morally responsible for what he has done even though, due to the presence of a counterfactual intervener, he could not have done otherwise. According to a compelling (yet relativel…Read more
  •  261
    Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (review)
    History of Intellectual Culture 2 (1). 2002.
  •  65
    Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, implicit awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenom…Read more
  •  146
    Phenomenal character as implicit self-awareness
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (12): 44-73. 2006.
    One of the more refractory problems in contemporary discussions of consciousness is the problem of determining what a mental state's being conscious consists in. This paper defends the thesis that a mental state is conscious if and only if it has a certain reflexive character, i.e., if and only if it has a structure that includes an awareness of itself. Since this thesis finds one of its clearest expressions in the work of Brentano, it is his treatment of the thesis on which I initially focus, t…Read more
  •  96
    Another Look at the Rule‐Following Paradox
    Philosophical Forum 45 (1): 69-88. 2014.
    Saul Kripke has famously argued that the central question of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, at least in relation to Wittgenstein's discussion of meaning, is the question: what facts determine that a speaker is following a particular rule? For example, assuming that language-use is a rule-governed activity, what facts determine that the rule a speaker is complying with in her current usage of a word is equivalent to the rule she complied with in her previous usage of the word? Accor…Read more
  •  97
    ‘Brain-Malfunction’ Cases and the Dispositionalist Reply to Frankfurt's Attack on PAP
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (4): 646-657. 2016.
    Harry Frankfurt has famously argued against the principle of alternate possibilities by presenting a case in which, apparently, a person is morally responsible for what he has done even though he could not have done otherwise. A number of commentators have proposed dispositionalist responses to Frankfurt, arguing that he has not produced a counterexample to PAP because, contrary to appearances, the ability to do otherwise is indeed present but is a disposition that has been ‘masked’ or ‘finked’ …Read more
  •  103
    Intentionalism and change blindness
    Philosophia 36 (3): 355-366. 2008.
    According to reductive intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is constituted by the experience's intentional (or representational) content. The goal of this article is to show that a phenomenon in visual perception called change blindness poses a problem for this doctrine. It is argued, in particular, that phenomenal character is not sensitive, as it should be if reductive intentionalism is correct, to fine-grained variations in content. The standard anti-intentionali…Read more
  •  64
    Rescuing PAP from Widerker's Brain-Malfunction Case
    Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 3 (2): 1-22. 2015.
    According to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. David Widerker, a prominent and long-time defender of this principle against Harry Frankfurt’s famous attack on it, has recently had an unexpected about-face: PAP, Widerker now contends, is (probably) false. His rejection of PAP is a result, in large part, of his coming to believe that there are conceptually possible scenarios, what he calls ‘I…Read more