-
1Peter Carruthers: "Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest" (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2020.
-
2Sinking Into StatelessnessTilburg Law Review 2014 (19): 20-25. 2014.If rising seas render small islands uninhabitable, will displaced islanders become stateless? The modern intellectual and legal tradition tells us that states must have defined, habitable territory. If so, small islands will cease to be states, and their inhabitants will accordingly become stateless. Against this, leading scholars have recently argued that the principle of presumption of continuity of state existence implies that island states continue to be states even after becoming uninhabita…Read more
-
39Those Fleeing States Destroyed by Climate Change Are Convention RefugeesBiblioteca Della Libertà 2023 (237): 63-96. 2023.Multiple states are at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, forcing their populations to flee. While the 1951 Refugee Convention provides the gold standard of international protection, it is only applied to a limited subset of people fleeing their countries, those who suffer persecution, which most people fleeing climate change cannot establish. While many journalists and non-lawyers freely use the term “climate refugees,” governments, and courts, as well as UNHCR and many refug…Read more
-
3Sources of Richness and Ineffability for Phenomenally Conscious StatesNeuroscience of Consciousness 2024 (1). 2024.Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, t…Read more
-
113Is Intelligence Non-Computational Dynamical Coupling?Cosmos+Taxis 12 (5+6): 23-36. 2024.Is the brain really a computer? In particular, is our intelligence a computational achievement: is it because our brains are computers that we get on in the world as well as we do? In this paper I will evaluate an ambitious new argument to the contrary, developed in Landgrebe and Smith (2021a, 2022). Landgrebe and Smith begin with the fact that many dynamical systems in the world are difficult or impossible to model accurately (inter alia, because it is intractable to find exact solutions to the…Read more
-
18The Protestant Theory of Determinable UniversalsIn Christer Svennerlind, Almäng Jan & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Johanssonian Investigations: Essays in Honour of Ingvar Johansson on His Seventieth Birthday, Ontos Verlag. pp. 503-515. 2013.In his 2000 paper, “Determinables are Universals”, Ingvar Johansson defends a version of immanent realism according to which universals are either lowest determinates, or highest determinables – either maximally specific and exact features (like Red27 or Perfectly Circular) or maximally general respects of similarity (like Colored or Voluminous). On Johansson 2000’s view, there are no intermediate-level determinable universals between the highest and the lowest. Let me call this the Protestant T…Read more
-
53Experiencing Left and Right in a Non‐Orientable WorldAnalytic Philosophy 62 (3): 201-222. 2021.Imagine that the person you see through the looking glass is a real person, with her own experiences, living in an environment that is the mirror-reverse of yours. You look at your right-hand glove as you put it on your right hand; she looks at her left-hand glove as she puts it on her left hand. You feel your heart beating on your left side; she feels her heart beating on her right side. You hear a bird chirping out the window to your left; she hears a bird chirping out the window to her right.…Read more
-
32Transparency About Painkillers: A Remedy for the Evaluativist's HeadachePacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (4): 935-951. 2019.The paradox of pain is that pain is in some ways like a bodily state and in other ways like a mental state. You can have a pain in your shin, but there is no denying that you are in pain if it feels like you are. How can a state be both in your shin and in your mind? Evaluativism is a promising answer. According to evaluativism, an experience of pain in your shin represents that there is a disturbance in your shin, and that it is bad that this disturbance is there. Thus, the experience brings yo…Read more
-
2Fragmenting the Wave FunctionOxford Studies in Metaphysics 11 123-148. 2018.This paper develops and defends a new account of B-theoretic endurantism and a new account of the metaphysics of the quantum state, and highlights the parallels between the considerations that motivate them. These new accounts are both fragmentalist, in the sense that they follow Fine (2005) in invoking a symmetric coordination relation between facts, such that facts that are pairwise incompatible (like Hugh's being happy and Hugh's being sad) can both obtain provided that they are not related b…Read more
-
65Mendelssohn, Kant, and the Mereotopology of ImmortalityErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4. 2017.In the first Critique, Kant claims to refute Moses Mendelssohn’s argument for the immortality of the soul. But some commentators, following Bennett (1974), have identified an apparent problem in the exchange: Mendelssohn appears to have overlooked the possibility that the “leap” between existence and non-existence might be a boundary or limit point in a continuous series, and Kant appears not to have exploited the lacuna, but to have instead offered an irrelevant criticism. Here, we argue that e…Read more
-
242Using philosophy to improve the coherence and interoperability of applications ontologies: A field report on the collaboration of IFOMIS and L&CIn Gregor Büchel, Bertin Klein & Thomas Roth-Berghofer (eds.), Proceedings of the First Workshop on Philosophy and Informatics. Deutsches Forschungszentrum für künstliche Intelligenz, Cologne: 2004 (CEUR Workshop Proceedings 112), . pp. 65-72. 2004.The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into …Read more
-
192The Hard Problem of the ManyPhilosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 449-468. 2017.A problem of the many Fs arises in cases where intuitively there is precisely one F (in the region you are talking about), but when you look closely you find many candidates for being that F, each one apparently as well-qualified as the next. Imagine an apparently solitary cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Look closer, and you'll see lots of water vapor molecules, with no one collection of them more eligible than the others to count as the cloud. Many things are like this when you look closely eno…Read more
-
633Formal Ontology for Natural Language Processing and the Integration of Biomedical DatabasesInternational Journal of Medical Informatics 75 (3-4): 224-231. 2005.The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application ontologies. To this end r®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)…Read more
-
226Formal ontology for biomedical knowledge systems integrationProceedings of Euromise 12-17. 2004.The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology will greatly benefit software application ontologies. To this end LinKBase®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic F…Read more
-
496Explications vérifactionnistesPhilosophiques 38 (1): 177-194. 2011.Le présent article est une tentative nouvelle d’articuler le rôle d’une théorie des vérifacteurs. Nous soutenons que la théorie de la vérifaction constitue une pierre angulaire dans une bonne méthodologie en métaphysique, mais que l’amalgame entre la théorie de la vérifaction et la théorie de la vérité a été responsable de certains excès associés aux approches vérifactionnistes dans la littérature récente. Nous montrons que la théorie de la vérifaction conserve son attrait comme instrument d’inv…Read more
-
172Is Time Travel a Problem for the Three-Dimensionalist?The Monist 88 (3): 353-361. 2005.Theodore Sider has recently produced an argument which he takes to show that three-dimensionalism is incompatible with the possibility of time travel. I wish to argue that there is indeed a problem for the three-dimensionalist who wishes to countenance time travel, but that Sider has misdiagnosed it. I show why his putative challenge fails, and furthermore that if it were to succeed this would be as problematic for a wide class of four-dimensionalist positions, including Sider’s own, as it would…Read more
-
915Vagueness and Zombies: Why ‘Phenomenally Conscious’ has No Borderline CasesPhilosophical Studies 174 (8): 2105-2123. 2017.I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a borderline case. I then appeal to the familiar c…Read more
-
101'Unable to Return' in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate ChangeFlorida Journal of International Law 26 (3): 531-574. 2014.Argues that it is not only a point of literal construction, but also inherent in the object and purpose of the 1951 Refugee Convention, that displaced stateless persons unable to return to their countries of former habitual residence may be eligible for refugee status even if unpersecuted. 'Unable to return' as it occurs in the clause following the semi-colon of 1(A)2 of the 1951 Refugee Convention must be understood as a term of art subject to appropriate canons of construction in its own right…Read more
-
441Truthmaker ExplanationsIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 79-98. 2007.This paper is a fresh attempt to articulate the role of a theory of truthmakers. We argue that truthmaker theory constitutes a cornerstone of good methodology in metaphysics, but that a conflation of truthmaker theory with the theory of truth has been responsible for certain excesses associated with truthmaker-based approaches in the recent literature. If truthmaker theory is not a component of a theory of truth, then truthmaker maximalism – the view that every truth has a truthmaker – loses its…Read more
-
118Indeterminate ComprehensionThought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (1): 39-48. 2014.Can we solve the Problem of the Many, and give a general account of the indeterminacy in definite descriptions that give rise to it, by appealing to metaphysically indeterminate entities? I argue that we cannot. I identify a feature common to the relevant class of definite descriptions, and derive a contradiction from the claim that each such description is satisfied by a metaphysically indeterminate entity
New York, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
PhilPapers Editorships
Simulation Argument |
Simulation Hypothesis |
Digital Physics |