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11After modernism and postmodernism, it is argued, the everyday supposedly is where a democracy of taste is brought into being - the place where art goes to recover its customary and collective pleasures, and where the shared pleasures of popular culture are indulged, from celebrity magazines to shopping malls. John Roberts argues that this understanding of the everyday downgrades its revolutionary meaning and philosophical implications. Bringing radical political theory back to the centre of the …Read more
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11Contact with the Nomic: A Challenge for Deniers of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature Part I: Humean SuperveniencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1): 1-22. 2007.This the first part of a two‐part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. the Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean base that, we argue, enables HS to capture what is re…Read more
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DeterminismIn Sahotra Sarkar & Jessica Pfeifer (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Routledge. pp. 1. 2005.
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10Photography and its ViolationsCambridge University Press. 2014.Theorists critique photography for "objectifying" its subjects and manipulating appearances for the sake of art. In this bold counterargument, John Roberts recasts photography's violating powers of disclosure and aesthetic technique as part of a complex "social ontology" that exposes the hierarchies, divisions, and exclusions behind appearances. The photographer must "arrive unannounced" and "get in the way of the world," Roberts argues, committing photography to the truth-claims of the spectato…Read more
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11The political economy of the imagePhilosophy of Photography 6 (1): 25-35. 2015.This article analyses the political economy of the image today, a historical conjuncture in which art contributes its meanings (even its critiques and negations) to a process of socialization through consumption. This analysis is pursued in light of the reception of an idea of the image drawn from a world before capitalism – or certainly on the edge of capitalism and modernity – as found in Novalis’s unfinished and posthumous novel Henry von Ofterdingen of 1802.
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464Fine-tuning and the infrared bull’s-eyePhilosophical Studies 160 (2): 287-303. 2012.I argue that the standard way of formalizing the fine-tuning argument for design is flawed, and I present an alternative formalization. On the alternative formalization, the existence of life is not treated as the evidence that confirms design; instead it is treated as part of the background knowledge, while the fact that fine tuning is required for life serves as the evidence. I argue that the alternative better captures the informal line of thought that gives the fine-tuning argument its intui…Read more
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9The book is not a history of photography, but a history of the theories of photography.
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29Measurements, laws, and counterfactualsIn Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 29. 2013.
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21And counterfactualsIn Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science, Oxford University Press. pp. 29. 2013.
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3Laws of Nature: Meeting the Empiricist ChallengeDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1999.Many philosophers insist that any adequate philosophical account of laws of nature must be consistent with Humean supervenience about the nomic . This is the thesis that the facts about the laws of nature must supervene on the particular, occurrent facts about the actual world. Earman argues that Humean supervenience poses an "empiricist loyalty test on laws." I concur, for as I argue, consistency with Humean supervenience is a necessary condition for upholding a plausible minimal empiricism con…Read more
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167Chance without CredenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (1): 33-59. 2013.It is a standard view that the concept of chance is inextricably related to the technical concept of credence . One influential version of this view is that the chance role is specified by (something in the neighborhood of) David Lewis's Principal Principle, which asserts a certain definite relation between chance and credence. If this view is right, then one cannot coherently affirm that there are chance processes in the physical world while rejecting the theoretical framework in which credence…Read more
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38Often when a new scientific theory is introduced, new terms are introduced along with it. Some of these new terms might be given explicit definitions using only terms that were in currency prior to the introduction of the theory. Some of them might be defined using other new terms introduced with the theory. But it frequently happens that the standard formulations of a theory do not define some of the new terms at all; these terms are adopted as primitives. The audience is expected to come to gr…Read more
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152A puzzle about laws, symmetries and measurabilityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (2): 143-168. 2008.I describe a problem about the relations among symmetries, laws and measurable quantities. I explain why several ways of trying to solve it will not work, and I sketch a solution that might work. I discuss this problem in the context of Newtonian theories, but it also arises for many other physical theories. The problem is that there are two ways of defining the space-time symmetries of a physical theory: as its dynamical symmetries or as its empirical symmetries. The two definitions are not equ…Read more
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159Leibniz on force and absolute motionPhilosophy of Science 70 (3): 553-573. 2003.I elaborate and defend an interpretation of Leibniz on which he is committed to a stronger space-time structure than so-called Leibnizian space-time, with absolute speeds grounded in his concept of force rather than in substantival space and time. I argue that this interpretation is well-motivated by Leibniz's mature writings, that it renders his views on space, time, motion, and force consistent with his metaphysics, and that it makes better sense of his replies to Clarke than does the standard…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Explanation |
Laws of Nature |
Chance-Credence Principles |
Quantities |
Induction |
Areas of Interest
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