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137Mental Realism ReloadedJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 40 (2): 337-340. 2009.
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313The Failure of Philosophical Knowledge: Why Philosophers are Not Entitled to Their BeliefsBloomsbury Academic. 2023.Philosophy begins and ends in disagreement. Philosophers disagree among themselves in innumerable ways, and this pervasive and permanent dissent is a sign of their inability to solve philosophical problems and establish substantive truths. This raises the question: What should I do with my philosophical beliefs in light of philosophy's epistemic failure? In this open-access book, János Tozsér develops four possible answers into comprehensive metaphilosophical visions and argues that we cannot fi…Read more
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213The pragmatic approach to fictive utterances and its consequences for mental fictionalismIn Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations, Routledge. pp. 199-213. 2022.This chapter has three aims. Firstly, it elaborates the so-called pragmatic approach to fictionalism. By evoking some classical pragmatic theories of fictive utterances, it gives an account of pragmatic properties responsible for the difference between serious and fictive utterances. The authors argue for the thesis that the pragmatic approach can be applied plausibly to all kinds of fictionalism, that is from instrumentalism to figuralism. Secondly, the authors investigate some consequences of …Read more
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117The phenomenological argument for the disjunctive theory of perceptionEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 5 (2): 53-66. 2009.According to the phenomenological argument for disjunctivism, the reasons why we should prefer the disjunctive theory over its rivals is that (1) the disjunctive theory conforms the most to our pretheoretical or natural convictions about perception (what Michael Martin calls naïve realism), and (2) we should commit ourselves to naïve realism because it conforms the most to the phenomenology of the perceptual experience of objects. In this paper, I try to explain why is the phenomenal argument …Read more
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669Mental Fictionalism As an Undermotivated TheoryThe Monist 96 (4): 622-638. 2013.Our paper consists of three parts. In the first part we explain the concept of mental fictionalism. In the second part, we present the various versions of fictionalism and their main sources of motivation.We do this because in the third part we argue that mental fictionalism, as opposed to other versions of fictionalism, is a highly undermotivated theory.
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273The biased nature of philosophical beliefs in the light of peer disagreementMetaphilosophy 52 (3-4): 363-378. 2021.This essay presents an argument, which it calls the Bias Argument, with the dismaying conclusion that (almost) everyone should significantly reduce her confidence in (too many) philosophical beliefs. More precisely, the argument attempts to show that the most precious philosophical beliefs are biased, as the pervasive and permanent disagreement among the leading experts in philosophy cannot be explained by the differences between their evidence bases and competences. After a short introduction, …Read more
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470In Defence of the Phenomenological Objection to Mental FictionalismOrganon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 27 (2): 169-186. 2020.In this paper, we defend the main claims of our earlier paper “Mental Fictionalism as an Undermotivated Theory” (in The Monist) from Gábor Bács’s criticism, which appeared in his “Mental fictionalism and epiphenomenal qualia” (in Dialectica). In our earlier paper, we tried to show that mental fictionalism is an undermotivated the-ory, so there is no good reason to give up the realist approach to the folk psychological discourse. The core of Bács’s criticism consists in that our argumentation res…Read more
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210Epistemic self-esteem of philosophers in the face of philosophical disagreementHuman Affairs 30 (3): 328-342. 2020.Our paper consists of four parts. In the first part, we describe the challenge of the pervasive and permanent philosophical disagreement over philosophers’ epistemic self-esteem. In the second part, we investigate the attitude of philosophers who have high epistemic self-esteem even in the face of philosophical disagreement and who believe they have well-grounded philosophical knowledge. In the third section, we focus on the attitude of philosophers who maintain a moderate level of epistemic sel…Read more
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285Rolling back the Rollback ArgumentTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 2 (39): 43-61. 2020.By means of the Rollback Argument, this paper argues that metaphysically robust probabilities are incompatible with a kind of control which can ensure that free actions are not a matter of chance. Our main objection to those (typically agent-causal) theories which both attribute a kind of control to agents that eliminates the role of chance concerning free actions and ascribe probabilities to options of decisions is that metaphysically robust probabilities should be posited only if they can have…Read more
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810Much Ado about Nothing: The Discarded Representations RevisitedIn Zsuzsanna Kondor (ed.), Enacting Images: Representation Revisited, Köln: Herbert Von Halem Verlag. pp. 47-66. 2013.Our paper consists of three parts. In the first part we provide an overall picture of the concept of the Cartesian mind. In the second, we outline some of the crucial tenets of the theory of the embodied mind and the main objections it makes to the concept of the Cartesian mind. In the third part, we take aim at the heart of the theory of the embodied mind; we present three examples which show that the thesis of embodiment of the subjective perspective is an untenable position. However, everythi…Read more
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403Physicalism and the Privacy of Conscious ExperienceJournal of Cognition and Neuroethics 4 (1): 73-88. 2016.The aim of the paper is to show that the privacy of conscious experience is inconsistent with any kind of physicalism. That is, if you are a physicalist, then you have to deny that more than one subject cannot undergo the very same conscious experience. In the first part of the paper we define the concepts of privacy and physicalism. In the second part we delineate two thought experiments in which two subjects undergo the same kind of conscious experience in such a way that all the physical proc…Read more
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975The works of art from the philosophically innocent point of viewHungarian Philosophical Review 57 (4): 7-17. 2012.the Mona Lisa, the Mondscheinsonate, the Chanson d’automne are works of art, the salt shaker on your table, the car in your garage, or the pijamas on your bed are not. the basic question of the metaphysics of works of art is this: what makes a thing a work of art? that is: what sort of property do works of art have in virtue of which they are works of art? or more simply: what sort of property being a work of art is? In this paper we argue that things are works of art in virtue of what they are …Read more
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309PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE METAPHYSIСs OF MINDIn N. D. Kruckova (ed.), Stavropolskij almanah Rossijskogo obŝestvo intellektualnoj istorii, Stavropol: Severo-kavkazskij Federalnij Universitet. 2012.My paper consists of five parts. In the first part I explain what I mean by the phenomenology of mind. In the second part I show that in contemporary analytic philosophy the prevailing metaphysical theories of the mind are typically not connected to the phenomenology of mind. Views on the nature of the mind are developed without considering the phenomenological facts. In the third part I outline a notion of metaphysics connected to the phenomenology of mind, then in the fourth and fifth parts I…Read more
János Tőzsér
Research Centre for The Humanities, Budapest, Hungary
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Research Centre for The Humanities, Budapest, HungarySenior Research Fellow
Areas of Specialization
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Mind |