-
New Water in Old Buckets: Hypothetical and Counterfactual Reasoning in Mach’s Economy of ScienceIn Friedrich Stadler (ed.), Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence, Springer Verlag. 2019.Ernst Mach’s defense of relativist theories of motion in Die Mechanik involves a well-known criticism of Newton’s theory appealing to absolute space, and of Newton’s “bucket” experiment. Sympathetic readers (Norton 1995) and critics (Stein 1967, 1977) agree that there’s a tension in Mach’s view: he allows for some constructed scientific concepts, but not others, and some kinds of reasoning about unobserved phenomena, but not others. Following Banks (2003), I argue that this tension can be interp…Read more
-
Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader (edited book)Routledge. 2014.Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader is a compact overview of HOPOS that aims to introduce students to the groundwork of the field. Part I of the Reader begins with classic texts in the history of logical empiricism, including Reichenbach's discovery-justification distinction. With careful reference to Kuhn's analysis of scientific revolutions, the section provides key texts analyzing the relationship of HOPOS to the history of science, including texts by Santayana, Rudwick, and …Read more
-
Laws of Nature (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.What is the origin of the concept of a law of nature? How much does it owe to theology and metaphysics? To what extent do the laws of nature permit contingency? Are there exceptions to the laws of nature? Is it possible to give a reductive analysis of lawhood, or is it a primitive? Twelve brand-new essays by an international team of leading philosophers take up these and other central questions on the laws of nature, whilst also examining some of the most important intuitions and assumptions tha…Read more
-
The psychophysics of order and anisotropy: Comment on RiemerConsciousness and Cognition 38 198-204. 2015.Riemer’s recent paper on the perception of time discusses a neglected yet important topic in the psychological literature: the consequences for psychology (and psychophysics) from the ‘anisotropy’ of time. The paper presents an argument that there are unique kinds of challenges for psychophysics from such temporal anisotropy: (a) Challenges because the psychological experience of time has temporal anisotropy and the physical concept of time does not have temporal anisotropy. (b) Challenges for e…Read more
-
Rani Lill Anjum & Stephen Mumford What Tends to Be: the Philosophy of Dispositional Modality. London & New York: Routledge, hbk pp. x+193 (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201903. 2019.There seems to be widespread agreement that there are two modal values: necessity and possibility. X is necessary if it is not possible that not-X; and Y is possible if it is not necessary that not-Y. In their path-breaking book, Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford defend the radical idea that there is a third modal value, weaker than necessity and stronger than possibility. This third value is dubbed 'dispositional modality' (DM) or 'tendency' and is taken to be an irreducible and sui generis w…Read more
-
Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-PhysicsOxford University Press. 2011.
-
A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption, written by Simon HøffdingJournal of Phenomenological Psychology 50 (2): 265-272. 2019.
-
Philosophy: Mind (MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks) (edited book)Macmillan. 2016.The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy series serves undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to philosophy, as well as the curious lay reader. Following this first primer volume, which introduces both the discipline and the topics of the remaining nine volumes, each handbook will usher the reader into a subfield of philosophy, and explore fifteen to thirty topics in that subfield. Every chapter in each volume will use vehicles such as film to facilitate u…Read more
-
Metaphysics and Cognitive Science (edited book)Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
-
Metaphysics and Cognitive Science (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.This volume illustrates how the methodology of metaphysics can be enriched with the help of cognitive science. Few philosophers nowadays would dispute the relevance of cognitive science to the metaphysics of mind, but this volume mainly concerns the relevance of metaphysics to phenomena that are not themselves mental. The volume is thus a departure from standard analytical metaphysics. Among the issues to which results from cognitive science are brought to bear are the metaphysics of time, of mo…Read more
-
Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy of Mind (edited book)Macmillan. 2016.
-
Hard, Harder, HardestIn Arthur Sullivan (ed.), Sensations, Thoughts, and Language: Essays in Honor of Brian Loar, Routledge. pp. 265-289. 2019.In this paper I discuss three problems of consciousness. The first two have been dubbed the “Hard Problem” and the “Harder Problem”. The third problem has received less attention and I will call it the “Hardest Problem”. The Hard Problem is a metaphysical and explanatory problem concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological, and it concerns whether we can know, given physicalism, whether some creature physically different from us is conscious. The Hardest Probl…Read more
-
Free Will & Empirical Arguments for EpiphenomenalismIn Peter Róna & László Zsolnai (eds.), Agency and Causal Explanation in Economics. Virtues and Economics, vol 5., Springer. pp. 3-20. 2019.While philosophers have worried about mental causation for centuries, worries about the causal relevance of conscious phenomena are also increasingly featuring in neuroscientific literature. Neuroscientists have regarded the threat of epiphenomenalism as interesting primarily because they have supposed that it entails free will scepticism. However, the steps that get us from a premise about the causal irrelevance of conscious phenomena to a conclusion about free will are not entirely clear. In f…Read more
-
Is property dualism better off than substance dualism?Philosophical Studies 164 (2): 533-542. 2013.
-
The principles of mathematics revisitedCambridge University Press. 1996.This book, written by one of philosophy's pre-eminent logicians, argues that many of the basic assumptions common to logic, philosophy of mathematics and metaphysics are in need of change. It is therefore a book of critical importance to logical theory. Jaakko Hintikka proposes a new basic first-order logic and uses it to explore the foundations of mathematics. This new logic enables logicians to express on the first-order level such concepts as equicardinality, infinity, and truth in the same l…Read more
-
Plato's Introduction of FormsCambridge University Press. 2004.Scholars of Plato are divided between those who emphasize the literature of the dialogues and those who emphasize the argument of the dialogues, and between those who see a development in the thought of the dialogues and those who do not. In this important book Russell Dancy focuses on the arguments and defends a developmental picture. He explains the Theory of Forms of the Phaedo and Symposium as an outgrowth of the quest for definitions canvassed in the Socratic dialogues, by constructing a Th…Read more
-
Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by QuestioningCambridge University Press. 2007.Most current work in epistemology deals with the evaluation and justification of information already acquired. In this book, Jaakko Hintikka instead discusses the more important problem of how knowledge is acquired in the first place. His model of information-seeking is the old Socratic method of questioning, which has been generalized and brought up-to-date through the logical theory of questions and answers that he has developed. Hintikka also argues that philosophers' quest for a definition o…Read more
-
Neuromodulation, Emotional Feelings and Affective DisordersMens Sana Monographs 14 (1): 5. 2016.
-
Putting Modal Metaphysics FirstSynthese (Suppl 8): 1-20. 2018.I propose that we approach the epistemology of modality by putting modal metaphysics first and, specifically, by investigating the metaphysics of essence. Following a prominent Neo-Aristotelian view, I hold that metaphysical necessity depends on the nature of things, namely their essences. I further clarify that essences are core properties having distinctive superexplanatory powers. In the case of natural kinds, which is my focus in the paper, superexplanatoriness is due to the fact that the es…Read more
-
Vacuous names and fictional entitiesHORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology 8 (2): 676-706. 2011.
-
Philosophical Troubles. Collected Papers Vol I (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.This important new book is the first of a series of volumes collecting essential work by an influential philosopher. It presents a mixture of published and unpublished works from various stages of Kripke's storied career. Included here are seminal and much discussed pieces such as “Identity and Necessity,” “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” and “A Puzzle About Belief.” More recent published work include “Russell's Notion of Scope” and “Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference” among others. Several of…Read more
-
How to Explain Behavior?Topics in Cognitive Science 12 (4): 1363-1381. 2020.Unlike behaviorism, cognitive psychology relies on mental concepts to explain behavior. Yet mental processes are not directly observable and multiple explanations are possible, which poses a challenge for finding a useful framework. In this article, I distinguish three new frameworks for explanations that emerged after the cognitive revolution. The first is called tools‐to‐theories: Psychologists' new tools for data analysis, such as computers and statistics, are turned into theories of mind. Th…Read more
-
The Scope and Generality of Bell’s TheoremFoundations of Physics 43 (9): 1153-1169. 2013.I present a local, deterministic model of the EPR-Bohm experiment, inspired by recent work by Joy Christian, that appears at first blush to be in tension with Bell-type theorems. I argue that the model ultimately fails to do what a hidden variable theory needs to do, but that it is interesting nonetheless because the way it fails helps clarify the scope and generality of Bell-type theorems. I formulate and prove a minor proposition that makes explicit how Bell-type theorems rule out models of th…Read more
-
On G.E. Moore’s ‘Proof of an External World’Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2). 2017.A new reading of G.E. Moore's ‘Proof of an External World’ is offered, on which the Proof is understood as a unique and essential part of an anti-sceptical strategy that Moore worked out early in his career and developed in various forms, from 1909 until his death in 1958. I begin by ignoring the Proof and by developing a reading of Moore's broader response to scepticism. The bulk of the article is then devoted to understanding what role the Proof plays in Moore's strategy, and how that role is …Read more
-
Knowledge and truth: A skeptical challengePacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (1): 93-101. 2019.It is widely accepted in epistemology that knowledge is factive, meaning that only truths can be known. We argue that this theory creates a skeptical challenge: because many of our beliefs are only approximately true, and therefore false, they do not count as knowledge. We consider several responses to this challenge and propose a new one. We propose easing the truth requirement on knowledge to allow approximately true, practically adequate representations to count as knowledge. In addition to a…Read more
-
Ad Infinitum: New Essays on Epistemological Infinitism (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2014.Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification, according to which there are no foundational reasons for belief. The view has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but after languishing for centuries it has recently begun a resurgence. Ad Infinitum presents new work on the topic by leading epistemologists. They shed new light on infinitism's distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and address questions, new and old,…Read more
-
Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
-
Epistemic Norms: New Essays on Action, Belief, and Assertion (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2013.
-
What Is the Problem of Perception?Synthesis Philosophica 20 (2): 237-264. 2005.What is the distinctively philosophical problem of perception? Here it is argued that it is the conflict between the nature of perceptual experience as it intuitively seems to us, and certain possibilities which are implicit in the very idea of experience: possibilities of illusion and to the world' which involves direct awareness of existing objects and their properties. But if one can have an experience of the same kind without the object being there -- a hallucination of an object -- then it …Read more
-
It will be obvious to anyone with a slight knowledge of twentieth-century analytic philosophy that one of the central themes of this kind of philosophy is the nature of perception: the awareness of the world through the five senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. Yet it can seem puzzling, from our twenty-first-century perspective, why there is a distinctively philosophical problem of perception at all. For when philosophers ask ‘what is the nature of perception?’, the question can be…Read more
Athens, Greece
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |