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Against FallibilismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 89 (4). 2011.In this paper I argue for a doctrine I call ?infallibilism?, which I stipulate to mean that If S knows that p, then the epistemic probability of p for S is 1. Some fallibilists will claim that this doctrine should be rejected because it leads to scepticism. Though it's not obvious that infallibilism does lead to scepticism, I argue that we should be willing to accept it even if it does. Infallibilism should be preferred because it has greater explanatory power than fallibilism. In particular, I …Read more
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Descartes and Epistemology With or Without GodPhilosophia: International Journal of Philosophy (Philippine e-journal) 16 (1): 65-86. 2015.The conventioral understanding takes God to pray a pivotal philosophical role in Descartes's epistemological project. Michael Della Rocca disagrees with this interpretation. In a recent article, " Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and epistemology without God," he forcefully argues for the view that takes God to be peripheral and at the fringe of Descartes's account of knowledge. He argues that Descartes renders God less important in his epistemology simply in virtue of having normative certainty…Read more
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Cartesian Social Epistemology? Contemporary Social Epistemology and Early Modern PhilosophyRoczniki Filozoficzne 68 (2): 155-178. 2020.Many contemporary social epistemologists take themselves to be combatting an individualist approach to knowledge typified by Descartes. Although I agree that Descartes presents an individualist picture of scientific knowledge, he does allow some practical roles for reliance on the testimony and beliefs of others. More importantly, however, his reasons for committing to individualism raise important issues for social epistemology, particularly about how reliance on mere testimony can propagate pr…Read more
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Individualism and DescartesTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 16 (1): 71-86. 1996.
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Was Descartes an Individualist? A Critical Discussion of W. Ferraiolo's" Individualism and Descartes"Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 16 (2): 77-85. 1997.In his article 'Individualism and Descartes' (Teorema, vol. 16, pp. 71-86), William Ferraiolo puts into question the widely accepted interpretation of Descartes as an individualist about mental content. In this paper, I defend this interpretation of Descartes thought against Ferraiolo's objections. I hold, first, that the interpretation is not historically misguided. Second, I try to show that Descartes’s endorsement of anti-individualism would lead either to depriving skeptical hypotheses of th…Read more
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Nomic moral naturalnessInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1-22. 2022.
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Parmenides' refutation of changeIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.
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Time-awareness and projection in Mellor and KantKant Studien 101 (1): 59-74. 2010.The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Ka…Read more
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Kant and the Conventionality of SimultaneityBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (5): 845-856. 2010.Kant’s three Analogies of Experience, in his Critique of Pure Reason, represent a highly condensed attempt to establish the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics. His strategy is to show that the organization of experience in terms of a world of enduring substances undergoing mutual causal interaction is a necessary condition of the temporal ordering even of one’s own subjective states, and thus of coherent experience itself. In his Third Analogy—an examination of the necessary condition…Read more
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Just the Arguments (edited book)Wiley‐Blackwell. 2011-09-16.
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Kant's refutation of idealismIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.
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Introduction: Heraclitus and ParmenidesIn Adrian Bardon & Heather Dyke (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, Wiley-blackwell. 2013.This is the introduction chapter of A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, which tackles the historical development of the philosophy of time. This volume brings together experts in the various branches of the philosophy of time from around the world. Part I of this volume features essays on the philosophy of time from the pre‐Socratic period through the twentieth century. Parts II and III reflect, respectively, on the physics and metaphysics of time, and on the study of the experience of time. …Read more
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Explaining Temporal Phenomenology: Hume’s Extensionalism and Kant’s ApriorismKant Studien 110 (3): 463-476. 2019.
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The Illusions of Time: Philosophical and Psychological Essays on Timing and Time Perception (edited book)Palgrave McMillan. 2019.This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its…Read more
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Parmenides' Refutation of ChangeIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-09-16.
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Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Time (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
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Transcendental Arguments and Kant's Refutation of IdealismDissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 1999.An anti-skeptical transcendental argument can be loosely defined as an argument that purports to show that some experience or knowledge of an external world is a necessary condition of our possession of some knowledge, concept, or cognitive ability that we know we have. In this dissertation I examine transcendental arguments by focusing on one such argument given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, along with some attempts to interpret that argument by contemporary commentators. ;I …Read more
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Kant's Refutation of IdealismIn Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-09-16.
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Rehabilitating Kant’s Third Analogy of Experience in advanceInternational Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.
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The Illusions of Time: Philosophical and Psychological Essays on Timing and Time Perception (edited book)Palgrave Macmillan. 2019.This edited collection presents the latest cutting-edge research in the philosophy and cognitive science of temporal illusions. Illusion and error have long been important points of entry for both philosophical and psychological approaches to understanding the mind. Temporal illusions, specifically, concern a fundamental feature of lived experience, temporality, and its relation to a fundamental feature of the world, time, thus providing invaluable insight into investigations of the mind and its…Read more
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The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Time (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2013.
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Knowledge, doubt, and circularitySynthese 188 (2): 273-287. 2012.Ernest Sosa's virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes's project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa's epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual…Read more
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Memory in the MeditationsRes Philosophica 92 (1): 41-60. 2015.This paper considers just how memory works throughout the Meditations to adduce Descartes’s conception of memory. Examining the meditator’s memory at work raises some questions about the nature of Cartesian memory and its epistemic role. What is the distinction between remembering and repeating a thought? If remembering is not simply repeating a thought, then what is involved in properly remembering? Can we remember properly while adding or shifting content, say, in virtue of articulating relati…Read more
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Cartesian critters can't rememberStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 69 72-85. 2018.Descartes held the following view of declarative memory: to remember is to reconstruct an idea that you intellectually recognize as a reconstruction. Descartes countenanced two overarching varieties of declarative memory. To have an intellectual memory is to intellectually reconstruct a universal idea that you recognize as a reconstruction, and to have a sensory memory is to neurophysiologically reconstruct a particular idea that you recognize as a reconstruction. Sensory remembering is thus a c…Read more
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Memory and the Cartesian circlePhilosophical Review 71 (4): 504-511. 1962.
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The Rational and the SanePhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 30 (2): 155-158. 2023.“But surely if it's not irrational, it can’t be OCD!” my friend exclaimed, when I told them about the paper Carolina Flores and Brent Kious provided their excellent comments for. In all fairness, my friend is not working in philosophy, or psychiatry, or in psychology. Still, I take their sentiment to be expressive of a widely held view: if you have a certain mental illness, then you must be irrational. Conversely, rationality guarantees mental health; the sane life is the rational life. In my pa…Read more
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Reality Making (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2016.What makes up reality, and how? What kinds of entity are fundamental to reality, and how do dependent entities depend on the fundamental ones? How does one entity metaphysically ground another? These questions are central to contemporary metaphysics. The papers in this collection, written by a new generation of metaphysicians, address these and related questions. They investigate the metaphysical concepts of grounding and fundamentality, and the relationship between the fundamental and all the o…Read more
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Pictures and NonsensePhilosophy Now 58 7-9. 2006.
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Imagine the possibilities: information without overloadLogique Et Analyse 49 (196). 2006.Information is often modelled as a set of relevant possibilities, treated as logically possible worlds. However, this has the unintuitive consequence that the logical consequences of an agent's information cannot be informative for that agent. There are many scenarios in which such consequences are clearly informative for the agent in question. Attempts to weaken the logic underlying each possible world are misguided. Instead, I provide a genuinely psychological notion of epistemic possibility a…Read more
Athens, Greece
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |