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47Rethinking Time and Determinism: What Happens to Determinism When You Take Relativity SeriouslyIn Remy Lestienne & Paul A. Harris (eds.), Time and Science, Volume 1: The Metaphysics of Time and Its Evolution, World Scientific Publishing. pp. 147-172. 2023.
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17Time: a very short introductionOxford University Press. 2021.What is time? What does it mean for time to pass? Is it possible to travel in time? What is the difference between the past and future? Until the work of Newton, these questions were purely topics of philosophical speculation. Since then we've learned a great deal about time, and its study has moved from a subject of philosophical reflection to instead became part of the subject matter of physics. This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to the current physical understanding of the direct…Read more
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6How to Be HumeanIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.This chapter argues that Humean analyses do not provide content‐preserving reductions and non‐trivial accounts of the reference. It introduces a distinction between structure in the realm of Being and structure in the representations of Being. The chapter argues that there are good reasons not to expect content‐preserving reductions of the modal to the non‐modal at the level of content, or useful mappings of content‐level structures into structures at the level of Being. In the rest of the chapt…Read more
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83The Open Universe: Totality, Self-reference and TimeAustralasian Philosophical Review. forthcoming.Before the twentieth century, the Universe was usually imagined as a large spatially extended thing unfolding in time. The past was fixed and the future was open; unfolding was conceived as an asymmetric process of coming into being. Relativity introduced a new vision in which space and time are presented together as a single four-dimensional manifold of events. That, together with the fact that the fundamental laws of our classical theories are symmetric in time, made understanding why the past…Read more
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Why (Study) the Humanities?: The View from ScienceIn Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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On chanceIn Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2020.
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1What Entanglement Might Be Telling Us: Space, Quantum Mechanics, and Bohm's Fish TankIn David Glick, George Darby & Marmodoro Anna (eds.), The Foundation of Reality: Fundamentality, Space, and Time, Oxford University Press. pp. 139-153. 2020.
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177Quantum holism: nonseparability as common groundSynthese 197 (10): 4131-4160. 2020.Quantum mechanics seems to portray nature as nonseparable, in the sense that it allows spatiotemporally separated entities to have states that cannot be fully specified without reference to each other. This is often said to implicate some form of “holism.” We aim to clarify what this means, and why this seems plausible. Our core idea is that the best explanation for nonseparability is a “common ground” explanation, which casts nonseparable entities in a holistic light, as scattered reflections o…Read more
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2Passage, Flow, and the Logic of Temporal PerspectivesIn Philippe Huneman & Christophe Bouton (eds.), Time of Nature and the Nature of Time: Philosophical Perspectives of Time in Natural Sciences, Springer. 2017.
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72Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices, and the Impossibility of Laplacean IntelligencesThe Monist 102 (4): 478-498. 2019.In a famous passage drawing implications from determinism, Laplace introduced the image an intelligence who knew the positions and momenta of all of the particles of which the universe is composed, and asserted that in a deterministic universe such an intelligence would be able to predict everything that happens over its entire history. It is not, however, difficult to establish the physical possibility of a counterpredictive device, i.e., a device designed to act counter to any revealed predict…Read more
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82On April 1, 2016, at the Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, a book symposium, organized by Alyssa Ney, was held in honor of David Albert’s After Physics. All participants agreed that it was a valuable and enlightening session. We have decided that it would be useful, for those who weren’t present, to make our remarks publicly available. Please bear in mind that what follows are remarks prepared for the session, and that on some points participants m…Read more
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95How Physics Makes Us FreeOxford University Press USA. 2016.In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of the universe. Can it really be that …Read more
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13The Situated SelfOxford University Press USA. 2006.J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world?
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108Self-Organization and Self-GovernancePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 41 (3): 327-351. 2011.The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of system-wide goals is mere appearance, i.…Read more
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939Probability in deterministic physicsJournal of Philosophy 106 (2): 89-108. 2009.The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explana…Read more
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1847An Empiricist's Guide to Objective ModalityIn Matthew H. Slater & Zanja Yudell (eds.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 109-125. 2017.In this paper, I defend an empiricist account of modality that keeps a substantive account of modal commitment, but throws out the metaphysics. I suggest that if we pair a deflationary attitude toward representation with a substantive account of how scientific models are constructed and put to use, the result is an account that deflates the metaphysics of modal commitment without deflating the content of modal claims.
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134Quantum mechanicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sen…Read more
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36Me, againIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, Mit Press. 2010.Thought about the self raises some very special problems. Some of these concern indexical reference quite generally, but there is one having to do with identity over time that seems to be unique to the self. I use an historical exchange between Anscombe and Descartes to bring out the problem, and propose a resolution that casts light both on why self-directed thought presents a unique epistemic predicament and where Descartes’ cogito may have gone wrong.
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203Denial of death We don’t like to think about our deaths, and there are cultural developments – social, technological, economic – that make it easier than ever before to live without constant reminders of our mortality. We hide the evidence of death. We live separately from our old people, and quarantine the dying in hospitals and hospices. It’s impolite to mention death in conversation. We view death not as natural and inevitable stage of life, but as a calamity, a mistake, an accident. This att…Read more
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113The situated selfOxford University Press. 2007.J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world? Ismael is an original and creative thinker who tries to understand our problematic concepts about the self and how they are related to our use of language in particular
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53A philosopher of science looks at idealization in political theorySocial Philosophy and Policy 33 (1-2): 11-31. 2016.:Rawls ignited a debate in political theory when he introduced a division between the ideal and nonideal parts of a theory of justice. In the ideal part of the theory, one presents a positive conception of justice in a setting that assumes perfect compliance with the rules of justice. In the nonideal part, one addresses the question of what happens under departures from compliance. Critics of Rawls have attacked his focus on ideal theory as a form of utopianism, and have argued that political th…Read more
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83There’s a long history of discussion of probability in philosophy, but objective chance separated itself off and came into its own as a topic with the advent of a physical theory - quantum mechanics - in which chances play a central, and apparently ineliminable, role. In 1980 David Lewis wrote a paper pointing out that a very broad class of accounts of the nature of chance apparently lead to a contradiction when combined with a principle that expresses the role of chance in guiding belief. There…Read more
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174How do causes depend on us? The many faces of perspectivalismSynthese 193 (1): 245-267. 2016.Huw Price has argued that on an interventionist account of cause the distinction is perspectival, and the claim prompted some interesting responses from interventionists and in particular an exchange with Woodward that raises questions about what it means to say that one or another structure is perspectival. I’ll introduce his reasons for claiming that the distinction between cause and effect on an interventionist account is perspectival. Then I’ll introduce a distinction between different ways …Read more
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187Curie's principleSynthese 110 (2): 167-190. 1997.A reading is given of Curie''s Principle that the symmetry of a cause is always preserved its effects. The truth of the principle is demonstrated and its importance, under the proposed reading, is defended.As far as I see, all a priori statements in physics have their origin in symmetry. (Weyl, Symmetry, p. 126).
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188Saving the baby: Dennett on autobiography, agency, and the selfPhilosophical Psychology 19 (3): 345-360. 2006.Dennett argues that the decentralized view of human cognitive organization finding increasing support in parts of cognitive science undermines talk of an inner self. On his view, the causal underpinnings of behavior are distributed across a collection of autonomous subsystems operating without any centralized supervision. Selves are fictions contrived to simplify description and facilitate prediction of behavior with no real correlate inside the mind. Dennett often uses an analogy with termite c…Read more
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