•  13
    Being part of science (review)
    Metascience 32 (3): 333-336. 2023.
  •  8
    Great expectations: reviews post-Covid
    Metascience 1-4. forthcoming.
  •  4
    The Protestant Theory of Determinable Universals
    In 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.
  •  14
    Disease diagnosis and treatment; could theranostics change everything?
    Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 24 (3): 401-408. 2021.
    There has always been an intimate and complex relationship between the diagnosis of a disease and its treatment. The approach dubbed theranostics aims to combine diagnostic techniques with therapeutic ones by deploying the same molecule in two roles, exploiting the specificity of its function to render disease treatment more effective. Does this technical development have the potential to change our conception of disease diagnosis? With the treatment approach so intimately linked to the diagnost…Read more
  •  65
    This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expertise in the prosecution cases, crime, responsibil…Read more
  •  21
    The Medical Drug as a Technological Object
    Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 23 (1): 51-67. 2019.
    This article considers the medical drug as a technological object, in order to determine what philosophy of technology can bring to the study of pharmaceuticals and what the study of medical drugs can bring to the philosophy of technology. This approach will allow us to locate the differences between the medical drug and other objects that usually form the focus for studies in the philosophy of technology, and to discuss the problematic fit of the models proposed in the field to pharmaceuticals.…Read more
  •  12
    History of science in France
    British Journal for the History of Science 1-7. forthcoming.
    Although maybe not the most fashionable area of study today, French science has a secure place in the classical canon of the history of science. Like the Scientific Revolution and Italian science at the beginning of the seventeenth century, French science, particularly eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century French science, remains a safe, albeit conservative, bet in terms of history-of-science teaching and research. The classic trope of the passage of the flame of European science from …Read more
  •  6
    Chemistry and industry
    Metascience 31 (3): 439-440. 2022.
  •  17
    What we publish in Metascience
    Metascience 31 (3): 293-296. 2022.
  •  47
    Experiencing left and right in a non‐orientable world
    Analytic Philosophy 62 (3): 201-222. 2021.
    Analytic Philosophy, Volume 62, Issue 3, Page 201-222, September 2021.
  •  21
    Transparency About Painkillers: A Remedy for the Evaluativist's Headache
    Pacific 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
  • Fragmenting the Wave Function
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 11 123-148. 2018.
  •  57
    Mendelssohn, Kant, and the Mereotopology of Immortality
    Ergo: 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
  •  201
    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
  •  177
    The hard problem of the many
    Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 449-468. 2017.
  •  579
    Formal Ontology for Natural Language Processing and the Integration of Biomedical Databases
    with James M. Fielding, Mariana C. Dos Santos, and Barry Smith
    International 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
  •  191
    Formal ontology for biomedical knowledge systems integration
    with J. M. Fielding and Barry Smith
    Proceedings 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
  •  455
    Explications vérifactionnistes
    Philosophiques 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
  •  100
    Indeterminate Comprehension
    Thought: 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
  •  150
    Is 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
  •  855
    Vagueness and zombies: why ‘phenomenally conscious’ has no borderline cases
    Philosophical 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
  •  91
    'Unable to Return' in the 1951 Refugee Convention: Stateless Refugees and Climate Change
    with Heather Alexander
    Florida 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
  •  385
    Truthmaker Explanations
    In 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