•  51
    The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgement and the Case Against Illusionism
    Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 16 (1): 1-13. 2023.
    Illusionism is the view that conscious experience is some sort of introspective illusion. According to illusionism, there is no conscious experience, but it merely seems like there is conscious experience. This would suggest that much phenomenological enquiry, including work on phenomenological psychopathology, rests on a mistake. Some philosophers have argued that illusionism is obviously false, because seeming is itself an experiential state, and so necessarily presupposes the reality of consc…Read more
  • This is a comprehensively edited reissue of a self-published book that was initially released in 2006, which was partly based on a Bachelor of Arts dissertation I completed at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge along with further original content. The book was mostly intended as a personal project to explicate some of my philosophical thinking, rather than as anything of professional interest to others in the discipline.
  •  50
    Gender affirming hormone treatment is an important part of the care of trans adolescents which enables them to develop the secondary sexual characteristics congruent with their identified genders. There is an increasing amount of empirical evidence showing the benefits of gender affirming hormone treatment for psychological health and social well-being in this population. However, in several countries, access to gender affirming hormone treatment for trans adolescents has recently been severely …Read more
  •  156
    The Functions of Diagnoses in Medicine and Psychiatry
    In Bluhm Robyn & Tekin Serife (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Psychiatry, Bloomsbury. pp. 507-526. 2019.
    Diagnoses are central to the practice of medicine, where they serve a variety of functions for clinicians, patients, and society. They aid communication, explain symptoms, inform predictions, guide therapeutic interventions, legitimize sickness, and authorize access to resources. Insofar as psychiatry is a discipline whose practice is shaped by medical conventions, its diagnoses are sometimes presented as if they serve the same sorts of function as diagnoses in bodily medicine. However, there ar…Read more
  •  69
    Do Psychiatric Diagnoses Explain? A Philosophical Investigation
    Dissertation, Lancaster University. 2017.
    This thesis is a philosophical examination of the explanatory roles of diagnoses in psychiatry. In medicine, diagnoses normally serve as causal explanations of patients’ symptoms. Given that psychiatry is a discipline whose practice is shaped by medical traditions, it is often implied that its diagnoses also serve such explanatory functions. This is evident in clinical texts that portray psychiatric diagnoses as referring to diseases that cause symptoms. However, there are problems which cast do…Read more
  •  163
    Classifying Sexes
    Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 10 (1): 35-52. 2023.
    In the political discourse regarding gender identity, the concept of biological sex has been weaponised by gender critical commentators to oppose gender affirmation for trans people. Recently, these commentators have appealed to an essentialist model of sex based on anisogamy, or relative gamete size, to argue that one’s sex is an immutable characteristic. I argue that the gender critical argument is unsound. The diverse purposes of sex classification and the complex variability of people’s sexu…Read more
  •  276
    Parenthood and the Concept of the Biological Tie
    Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 2 (7): 7-19. 2021.
    It is widely assumed that there is value in the biological tie between parent and child. An implication of this is that adoption is often considered a less desirable alternative to procreation. This paper offers a philosophical defence of adoptive parenthood as a valuable and authentic form of parenthood. While previous defences have suggested that society’s valorisation of the biological tie is unjustified, I argue herein that the conception of the biological tie that features in the normative …Read more
  •  101
    A Dilemma in Rape Crisis and a Contribution from Philosophy
    Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 1 (8): 93. 2021.
    The notion that rape is an act of violence rather than sex is a central tenet in rape crisis support and education. A therapeutic benefit of this conceptualisation of rape is that it counters shame and guilt by affirming that the victim was not a complicit partner in an act of sex. However, this conceptualisation has recently been criticised for not capturing what makes rape an especially serious kind of wrong. This raises an apparent dilemma for rape crisis support. Recent work in analytic mora…Read more
  •  125
    The Causal Explanatory Functions of Medical Diagnoses
    Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 38 (1): 41-59. 2017.
    Diagnoses in medicine are often taken to serve as explanations of patients’ symptoms and signs. This article examines how they do so. I begin by arguing that although some instances of diagnostic explanation can be formulated as covering law arguments, they are explanatory neither in virtue of their argumentative structures nor in virtue of general regularities between diagnoses and clinical presentations. I then consider the theory that medical diagnoses explain symptoms and signs by identifyin…Read more
  •  115
    In the philosophical literature on consciousness and the mind-body problem, the conceivability argument against physicalism is usually taken to support a form of dualism between physicality and phenomenality. Usually, the discussion focuses on the qualitative character of experience, which is what the phenomenal feel of a given experience is like. By contrast, the subjective character of experience, or its individuation to a given first-person subject, tends to be set aside. The aim of this pape…Read more
  •  89
    Review of Jonathan Y. Tsou’s Philosophy of Psychiatry (review)
    Philosophy of Medicine 4 (1). 2023.
  •  86
  •  127
    Externalist Argument Against Medical Assistance in Dying for Psychiatric Illness
    Journal of Medical Ethics 49 (8): 553-557. 2023.
    Medical assistance in dying, which includes voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, is legally permissible in a number of jurisdictions, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. Although medical assistance in dying is most commonly provided for suffering associated with terminal somatic illness, some jurisdictions have also offered it for severe and irremediable psychiatric illness. Meanwhile, recent work in the philosophy of psychiatry has led to a renewed understanding of…Read more
  •  296
    Causation and Causal Selection in the Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease
    European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2): 5-27. 2021.
    In The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease, Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett argue that a defensible updated version of the biopsychosocial model requires a metaphysically adequate account of disease causation that can accommodate biological, psychological, and social factors. This present paper offers a philosophical critique of their account of biopsychosocial causation. I argue that their account relies on claims about the normativity and the semantic content of biological information t…Read more
  •  171
    Thought Insertion and the Minimal Self
    Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 14 (2): 32-41. 2021.
    This paper contributes to the debate in the philosophy of psychiatry regarding the relation between thought insertion in schizophrenia and the sense of selfhood. Some scholars have suggested that thought insertion presents a case where the sense of selfhood is lacking. Other scholars have disputed this by proposing that a form of minimal selfhood is a necessary feature of consciousness that is still present in thought insertion, albeit in a disturbed manner. Herein, I argue that the notion of mi…Read more
  •  142
    Mental Disorder and Suicide: What’s the Connection?
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (3): 345-367. 2022.
    This paper offers a philosophical analysis of the connection between mental disorder and suicide risk. In contemporary psychiatry, it is commonly suggested that this connection is a causal connection that has been established through empirical discovery. Herein, I examine the extent to which this claim can be sustained. I argue that the connection between mental disorder and increased suicide risk is not wholly causal but is partly conceptual. This in part relates to the way suicidality is built…Read more
  •  96
    Panpsychism, Conceivability, and Dualism Redux
    Synthesis Philosophica 34 (1): 157-172. 2019.
    In contemporary philosophy of mind, the conceivability argument against physicalism is often used to support a form of dualism, which takes consciousness to be ontologically fundamental and distinct from physical matter. Recently, some proponents of the conceivability argument have also shown interest in panpsychism, which is the view that mentality is ubiquitous in the natural world. This paper examines the extent to which panpsychism can be sustained if the conceivability argument is taken ser…Read more
  •  73
    Review of Philip Goff's Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (review)
    Synthesis Philosophica 36 (1): 242-245. 2021.
  •  118
    Psychopathic Personalities and Developmental Systems
    Philosophical Psychology 34 (4): 502-528. 2021.
    Is psychopathy born or made? Contemporary psychopathy research shows that there is much wrong with this question. It is increasingly accepted that the development of psychopathy is dependent on multiple causal factors interacting with one another. However, there remains the major theoretical challenge of understanding the relations between these multiple causal factors in the developmental process. In this paper, I argue that the conventional picture of gene-environment interactionism does not o…Read more
  •  112
    To What Do Psychiatric Diagnoses Refer? A Two-Dimensional Semantic Analysis of Diagnostic Terms
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55 1-10. 2016.
    In somatic medicine, diagnostic terms often refer to the disease processes that are the causes of patients' symptoms. The language used in some clinical textbooks and health information resources suggests that this is also sometimes assumed to be the case with diagnoses in psychiatry. However, this seems to be in tension with the ways in which psychiatric diagnoses are defined in diagnostic manuals, according to which they refer solely to clusters of symptoms. This paper explores how theories of…Read more
  •  112
    Pluralism and Incommensurability in Suicide Research
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 80 101247. 2020.
    This paper examines the complex research landscape of contemporary suicidology from a philosophy of science perspective. I begin by unpacking the methods, concepts, and assumptions of some of the prominent approaches to studying suicide causation, including psychological autopsy studies, epidemiological studies, biological studies, and qualitative studies. I then analyze the different ways these approaches partition the causes of suicide, with particular emphasis on the ways they conceptualize t…Read more
  •  132
    Is Infertility a Disease and Does It Matter?
    Bioethics 33 (1): 43-53. 2018.
    Claims about whether or not infertility is a disease are sometimes invoked to defend or criticize the provision of state-funded treatment for infertility. In this paper, I suggest that this strategy is problematic. By exploring infertility through key approaches to disease in the philosophy of medicine, I show that there are deep theoretical disagreements regarding what subtypes of infertility qualify as diseases. Given that infertility's disease status remains unclear, one cannot uncontroversia…Read more
  •  428
    Psychosis and Intersubjective Epistemology
    Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences 5 (2): 31-41. 2012.
    Delusions and hallucinations present a challenge to traditional epistemology by allowing two people’s experiences of the world to be vastly different to each other. Traditional objective realism assumes that there is a mind-independent objective world of which people gain knowledge through experience. However, each person only has direct access to his or her own subjective experience of the world, and so neither can be certain that his or her experience represents an objective world more acc…Read more
  •  160
    Diagnosis and Causal Explanation in Psychiatry
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 60 (C): 15-24. 2016.
    In clinical medicine, a diagnosis can offer an explanation of a patient's symptoms by specifying the pathology that is causing them. Diagnoses in psychiatry are also sometimes presented in clinical texts as if they pick out pathological processes that cause sets of symptoms. However, current evidence suggests the possibility that many diagnostic categories in psychiatry are highly causally heterogeneous. For example, major depressive disorder may not be associated with a single type of underlyin…Read more
  •  118
    Ethical Problems with Ethnic Matching in Gamete Donation
    Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (2): 112-116. 2019.
    Assisted reproduction using donor gametes is a procedure that allows those who are unable to produce their own gametes to achieve gestational parenthood. Where conception is achieved using donor sperm, the child lacks a genetic link to the intended father. Where it is achieved using a donor egg, the child lacks a genetic link to the intended mother. To address this lack of genetic kinship, some fertility clinics engage in the practice of matching the ethnicity of the gamete donor to that of the …Read more
  •  156
    Dualism and Its Place in a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 22 (1): 59-69. 2019.
    It is often claimed in parts of the psychiatric literature that neuroscientific research into the biological basis of mental disorder undermines dualism in the philosophy of mind. This paper shows that such a claim does not apply to all forms of dualism. Focusing on Kenneth Kendler’s discussion of the mind–body problem in biological psychiatry, I argue that such criticism of dualism often conflates the psychological and phenomenal concepts of the mental. Moreover, it fails to acknowledge that th…Read more
  •  94
    What’s My Age Again? Age Categories as Interactive Kinds
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1): 1-24. 2021.
    This paper addresses a philosophical problem concerning the ontological status of age classification. For various purposes, people are commonly classified into categories such as “young adulthood”, “middle adulthood”, and “older adulthood”, which are defined chronologically. These age categories prima facie seem to qualify as natural kinds under a homeostatic property cluster account of natural kindhood, insofar as they capture certain biological, psychological, and social properties of people t…Read more
  •  141
    Review of Evan Thompson's Why I Am Not a Buddhist (review)
    Philosophy East and West 70 (4): 1-8. 2020.
  •  80
    Epistemic Possibility and the Necessity of Origin
    Metaphilosophy 51 (5): 685-701. 2020.
    The necessity of origin suggests that a person’s identity is determined by the particular pair of gametes from which the person originated. An implication is that speculative scenarios concerning how we might otherwise have been had our gametic origins been different are dismissed as being metaphysically impossible. Given, however, that many of these speculations are intelligible and commonplace in the discourses of competent speakers, it is overhasty to dismiss them as mistakes. This paper offe…Read more