•  54
    _Buddhist Philosophy of Consciousness_ explores a variety of different approaches to the study of consciousness developed by Buddhist philosophers in classical India and China. It addresses questions that are still being investigated in cognitive science and philosophy of mind.
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    The presupposition strategy is a widely adopted approach to understanding the catus.kot.i or tetralemmas that appear in Nāgārjuna’s works. According to this strategy, the apparent contradictions between the statements in the tetralemmas can be resolved by viewing them as making the false presupposition that there are entities that have svabhāva, independent existence or intrinsic nature, and hence as semantically deficient. Contemporary discussions of the strategy, however, do not take into acco…Read more
  •  74
    Color, Relativism, and Realism
    Philosophical Studies 108 (3): 251-288. 2002.
    It is plausible to think that some animals perceive the world as coloreddifferently from the way humans perceive it. I argue that the best way ofaccommodating this fact is to adopt perceiver-relativism, the view that colorpredicates express relations between objects and types of perceivers.Perceiver-relativism makes no claim as to the identity of color properties;it is compatible with both physicalism and dispositionalism. I arguehowever for a response-dependence version of it according to which…Read more
  •  2
    This dissertation is a study of emotionally expressive qualities in the arts, focusing especially on painting and music. I argue for two main claims, first that statements such as 'that's a melancholy painting' should be viewed not as the ordinary descriptions of objects that they might appear to be, but as expressing the perceiver's experience of the artwork; and second that the experience thus expressed is non-conceptual in the sense that the perceiver does not possess any concept of the quali…Read more
  •  131
    Consciousness and the Prospects for Substance Dualism
    Philosophy Compass 8 (11): 1054-1065. 2013.
    There has in recent years been a significant surge of interest in non-materialist accounts of the mind. Property dualists hold that all substances (concrete particulars that persist over time) are material, but mental properties are distinct from physical properties. Substance dualists maintain that the mind or person is a non-material substance. This article considers the prospects for substance dualism given the current state of the debate. The best known type of substance dualism, Cartesian d…Read more
  •  101
    Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Buddhist Thought
    Philosophy Compass 7 (10): 741-751. 2012.
    Recent years have seen a growing interest in Buddhist thought as a potential source of alternative conceptions of the nature of the mind and the relation between the mental and the physical. This article considers and assesses three different models of what contemporary philosophy of mind can learn from Buddhist thought. One model, advocated by Alan Wallace, holds that we can learn from Buddhist meditation that both individual consciousness and the physical world itself emerge from a deeper, “pr…Read more
  •  78
    The tiantai roots of dōgen's philosophy of language and thought
    Philosophy East and West 56 (3): 428-450. 2006.
    : Many recent studies of Dōgen have rightly emphasized that for Dōgen language and thought are capable of expressing the buddha dharma. But they have not recognized that this positive assessment of language rests on an underlying critique of the prevalent commonsense view that language functions by representing an independent reality. Focusing on Dōgen's use of apparently paradoxical language, it is suggested that in order to understand this critique we need to trace it back to its roots in the …Read more
  •  54
    This paper defends a “conceptualist” interpretation of Nāgārjuna which stands in-between two other prominent accounts, the nihilist view and what I call the anti-essentialist view. The nihilist reading, recently defended by Thomas Wood, holds that for Nāgārjuna nothing exists either at the ultimate or at the conventional level. On the anti-essentialist account, supported by Jay Garfield and David Kalupahana, though Nāgārjuna rejects the ultimate existence of things as svabhāva (independent), he…Read more
  •  51
    Expressiveness, Ineffability, and Nonconceptuality
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (3): 303-314. 2012.
    In much of the discussion of expressive qualities in the 19th and 20th Centuries, music and artworks were viewed as capable of expressing emotions too fine-grained to be captured by language or concepts, and this ineffability and nonconceptuality was seen as a primary source of the value of music and the arts. In recent debates about expressive qualities, however, there has been a good deal of skepticism about both the ineffability claim and the claim about value. This essay argues for a moder…Read more
  •  44
    Conceptual Atomism, Externalism, and the Gradient Applicability of Concepts
    Journal of Philosophical Research 38 419-441. 2013.
    The most prominent recent model of how concepts can have gradient applicability—that is, apply more fully to some items than to others—is that supplied by the prototype theory. Such a model, however, assumes concepts to be internally individuated and structured, and it might thus be challenged by both concept externalism and conceptual atomism. This paper argues that neither of these challenges presents an obstacle to viewing some concepts as having gradient application, and develops a different…Read more
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    Expression theory of art
    In Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Oxford University Press. pp. 1--139. 1998.