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Dispositional propertiesIn A. R. J. Fisher & Anna-Sofia Maurin (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Properties, Routledge. 2024.
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12Dispositional PluralismIn Gregor Damschen, Robert Schnepf & Karsten Stueber (eds.), Debating Dispositions. Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, De Gruyter. pp. 186-203. 2009.
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200Getting Causes from Powers By Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill AnjumAnalysis 73 (2): 402-404. 2013.
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259Are Dispositions Causally Relevant?Synthese 144 (3): 357-371. 2005.To determine whether dispositions are causally relevant, we have to get clear about what causal relevance is. Several characteristics of causal relevance have been suggested, including Explanatory Power, Counterfactual Dependence, Lawfullness, Exclusion, Independence, and Minimal Sufficiency. Different accounts will yield different answers about the causal relevance of dispositions. However, accounts of causal relevance that are the most plausible, for independent reasons, render the verdict tha…Read more
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52Response to Kadri Vihvelin’s “counterfactuals and dispositions”Philosophical Studies (1): 1-4. 2012.
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Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of MindWalter de Gruyter. 2009.
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243Causes as powers: Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum: Getting causes from powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 272pp, £35 HB (review)Metascience 22 (3): 545-559. 2013.
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9Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ISBN: 978-1350090088, $88 Hbk (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (1): 155-161. 2020.
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32Christopher Prendergast, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might Have Been, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. ISBN: 978-1350090088, $88 Hbk (review)Journal of Value Inquiry 1-7. 2019.As author Christopher Prendergast acknowledges, Counterfactuals: Paths of the Might have Been does not attempt to offer a theory of counterfactuals, nor does it develop a contribution to an existing theory. Instead, it is as the author puts it an “anthropology of the counterfactual”. However, it is nothing as systematic as that. It is not a survey, but a series of “listening exercises” which roam over literature, history, art, philosophy, music, and popular culture. He admits that this exercise …Read more
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45Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage be Saved?In Pieranna Garavaso (ed.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Academic Feminism, Bloomsbury. pp. 58-79. 2018.Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some fe…Read more
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25Real PotentialIn Kristina Engelhard & Michael Quante (eds.), Handbook of Potentiality, Springer. 2018.There's a student in my philosophy class who has "real potential." I might express this thought in any of the following ways: "She is potentially a philosopher"; "She is a potential philosopher"; "She has the potential to be a philosopher." The first way uses a cognate of "potential" as an adverb to modify "is." The second ways uses "potential" as an adjective to modify "philosopher." However, the third way uses "potential" as a noun to refer to something that the student has. What kind of thing…Read more
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13Indirect DirectnessOxford Studies in Metaphysics 10. 2017.In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll appeals to teleology to account for the way that dispositions seem to be directed toward their merely possible manifestations. He argues that his teleological account of dispositions does a better job of making sense of this directedness than rival approaches that appeal to conditional statements or physical intentionality. In this short critique, I argue that, without satisfactory clarification of a number of issues, TAD does not adequately account for…Read more
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31Dispositional Pluralism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.Jennifer McKitrick offers an opinionated guide to the philosophy of dispositions. In her view, when an object has a disposition, it is such that, if a certain type of circumstance were to occur, a certain kind of event would occur. Since this is very common for this to be the case, dispositions are an abundant and diverse feature of our world.
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79Barbara Vetter: Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality: Oxford University Press, 2015, 352 pp, £52.00 , ISBN: 9780198714316Erkenntnis 84 (5): 1179-1182. 2019.
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10Reid's Foundation for the Primary/Secondary Quality DistinctionPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (209): 476-494. 2002.Reid offers an under‐appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, are unknown causes of sensations. Some may object that Reid's view is internally …Read more
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24Review: Kadri Vihvelin, Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter (review)Ethics 125 (4): 1230-1236. 2015.
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28Dispositional PluralismIn Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 186-203. 2009.In this paper, I make the case for the view that there are many different kinds of dispositions, a view I call dispositional pluralism. The reason I think that this case needs to be made is to temper the tendency to make sweeping generalization about the nature of dispositions that go beyond conceptual truths. Examples of such generalizations include claims that all dispositions are intrinsic, essential, fundamental, or natural.! In order to counter this tendency, I will start by noting the exte…Read more
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26Introduction to Establishing Medical Reality: Essays in the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Biomedical ScienceIn Harold Kincaid & Jennifer McKitrick (eds.), Establishing Medical Reality, Springer. pp. 1-11. 2007.Medicine has been a very fruitful source of significant issues for philosophy over the last 30 years. The vast majority of the issues discussed have been normative—they have been problems in morality and political philosophy that now make up the field called bioethics. However, biomedical science presents many other philosophical questions that have gotten relatively little attention, particularly topics in metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science. This volume focuses on problems in t…Read more
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The Metaphysics of DispositionsDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1999.As Nelson Goodman put it, things are full of threats and promises. A fragile glass, for example, is prone to shatter when struck. Fragility is the glass's disposition, shattering is the manifestation of the disposition, and striking is the circumstances of manifestation. The properties of a fragile glass which are causally efficacious for shattering constitute the causal basis of the glass's fragility. The glass can remain fragile even if it never shatters. One can say of the fragile glass, with…Read more
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29Liberty, Gender, and the FamilyIn Tibor R. Machan (ed.), Liberty and Justice, Hoover Institution Press. pp. 83-103. 2006.DISCUSSIONS OF JUSTICE within the classical liberal, libertarian tradition have been universalist. They have aspired to apply to any human community, whatever the makeup of its membership. Certainly some feminists have taken issue with this, arguing that the classical liberal, libertarian understanding of justice fails to address the concerns of women, indeed, does women an injustice. Among these we find Susan Moller Okin, and it will be my task in this essay to explore whether Okin's criticism …Read more
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18Book review: Gideon yaffee, Manifest Activity: Thomas Reid's Theory of ActionJournal of Value Inquiry 39 (3-4): 513-19. 2005.Gideon Yaffee’s Manifest Activity is an important contribution to both the studies of Thomas Reid’s views and action theory. Reid is known as an early advocate of an agent-causal view of free will; more recent advocates include Roderick Chisholm. Manifest Activity is a well-appreciated effort at bringing Reid’s particular version of agent-causalism and his arguments for it into the contemporary discussion. Manifest Activity should be of interest to Reid scholars, action theorists, and anyone who…Read more
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666Rosenberg on causationPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 12. 2006.This paper is an explication and critique of a new theory of causation found in part II of Gregg Rosenberg's _A Place for Consciousness._ According to Rosenberg's Theory of Causal significance, causation constrains indeterminate possibilities, and according to his Carrier Theory, physical properties are dispositions which have phenomenal properties as their causal bases. This author finds Rosenberg's metaphysics excessively speculative, with disappointing implications for the place of consciousn…Read more
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62Gender Identity DisorderIn Harold Kincaid & Jennifer McKitrick (eds.), Establishing Medical Reality, Springer. pp. 137-48. 2007.According to the DSM IV, a person with GID is a male or female that feels a strong identification with the opposite sex and experiences considerable stress because of their actual sex (Task Force on DSM-IV and American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The way GID is characterized by health professionals, patients, and lay people belies certain assumptions about gender that are strongly held, yet nevertheless questionable. The phenomena of transsexuality and sex-reassignment surgery puts into star…Read more
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261A case for extrinsic dispositionsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2). 2003.Many philosophers think that dispositions are necessarily intrinsic. However, there are no good positive arguments for this view. Furthermore, many properties (such as weight, visibility, and vulnerability) are dispositional but are not necessarily shared by perfect duplicates. So, some dispositions are extrinsic. I consider three main objections to the possibility of extrinsic dispositions: the Objection from Relationally Specified Properties, the Objection from Underlying Intrinsic Properties,…Read more
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38Thomas Reid's theory of perception - by Ryan Nichols (review)Philosophical Books 49 (3): 257-261. 2008.No Abstract
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47Manifestations as effectsIn Anna Marmodoro (ed.), The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Their Manifestations, Routledge. 2010.According to a standard characterization of dispositions, when a disposition is activated by a stimulus, a manifestation of that disposition typically occurs. For example, when flammable gasoline encounters a spark in an oxygen-rich environment, the manifestation of flammability—combustion—occurs. In the dispositions/powers literature, it is common to assume that a manifestation is an effect of a disposition being activated. (I use “disposition” and “power” interchangeably). I address two questi…Read more
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110Dispositions and PotentialitiesIn John Lizza (ed.), Potentiality: Metaphysical and Bioethical Dimensions, John Hopkins Univerity Press. pp. 49-68. 2014.Dispositions and potentialities seem importantly similar. To talk about what something has the potential or disposition to do is to make a claim about a future possibilitythe "threats and promises" that fill the world (Goodman 1983, 41). In recent years, dispositions have been the subject of much conceptual analysis and metaphysical speculation. The inspiration for this essay is the hope that that work can shed some light on discussions of potentiality. I compare the concepts of disposition and …Read more
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37Review of Max Kistler, Bruno Gnassounou (eds.), Dispositions and Causal Powers (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (7). 2008.
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46How to Activate a PowerIn Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 123-37. 2013.According to most views of dispositions or powers, they have “triggers” or activation conditions. Fragile things break when they are struck; explosive things explode when ignited. The notion of an activation event, or “trigger,” is central to the notion of a disposition. Dispositions are defined not only by their manifestations, but also by their triggers. Not everyone who grumbles and complains counts as irritable—just those who do so with little inducement. Not everything that can be broken co…Read more
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University of Nebraska, LincolnProfessor
Lincoln, Nebraska, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Feminist Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender |