• The Content of Existence
    In Milton Karl Munitz (ed.), Logic and ontology, New York University Press. pp. 21--35. 1973.
  •  1
    Propositional Attitudes: The Role of Content in Language, Logic, and Mind (edited book)
    with C. Anthony Anderson
    CSLI Publications. 1990.
  •  22
    Das Prinzipienproblem in der Philosophie des Thomas von Aquin (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 38 (1): 129-130. 1984.
    This book is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It notes that modern writers on Aquinas, unlike those on other philosophers, seldom disagree with him, and that especially he has to be set free from the prejudices of the later textbook Thomism institutionalized by the encyclical Aeterni Patris. Accordingly the book proposes to meet this situation by following the lead of the fifteenth-century Peter of Bergamo and the work of E.-H. Wéber in emphasiz…Read more
  •  48
    Aquinas on Knowing Existence
    Review of Metaphysics 29 (4). 1976.
    DIFFICULTIES about existence have plagued Western thought since the time of Parmenides. The Eleatic sage had concentrated on what was most obvious and most incontrovertible to him, namely, that something exists. He made that tenet the way and the test of truth. From it he drew consequences that succeeding Greek thinkers from Empedocles to Plotinus accepted in part and rejected in part, intrigued by much of what he had stated but repelled by seeming enormities in some of his conclusions. Later, t…Read more
  •  56
    The Failure of Lewis’s Functionalism
    Philosophical Quarterly 36 (143): 159-173. 1986.
  •  104
    The failure of Lewis's functionalism
    Philosophical Quarterly 32 (April): 159-73. 1982.
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    In defense of a different doppelganger
    Philosophical Review 96 (October): 521-54. 1987.
  •  10
    Further Thoughts on Knowledge of Being and Truth
    New Scholasticism 60 (4): 454-470. 1986.
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    Books in review
    with Rudolf J. Siebert, Jasper Hopkins, Joanmarie Smith, Johan H. Stohl, and Charles R. Campbell
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (2): 122. 1978.
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    Cognition: An Epistemological Inquiry
    University of Notre Dame Press. 1992.
    Cognition is a basic introductory text for college courses in the philosophy of knowledge. Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., here expands the narrowly metaphysical treatment of knowledge given in his earlier book, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, into a full-fledged epistemology. This text utilizes the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to reacquaint students of philosophy with a number of insights basic for a philosophic understanding of knowledge. These insights into the nature of abstraction…Read more
  •  33
    Semantic Comprehension, Inference and Psychological Externalism
    Mind and Language 28 (2): 173-203. 2013.
    The externalist examples of Burge, Putnam etc. were offered as examples of how it is physically identical twins can differ in mental states such as belief, and little attention was paid to the interpretations the twins impose on their respective acoustic inputs. The received story today is that this form of interpretation—the semantic reading one assigns the sounds one hears—is the product of inference. The problem for this inferential model is simple to state: though the twins are physical dopp…Read more
  •  45
    Contradictory Belief and Cognitive Access
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 14 (1): 289-316. 1989.
  •  229
    Externalism, self-knowledge, and skepticism
    Philosophical Review 103 (1): 107-37. 1994.
    Psychological externalism is the thesis that the contents of many of a person's propositional mental states are determined in part by relations he bears to his natural and social environment. This thesis has recently been thrust into prominence in the philosophy of mind by a series of thought experiments due to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Externalism is a metaphysical thesis, but in this work I investigate its implications for the epistemology of the mental. I am primarily concerned with the …Read more
  •  96
    My primary goal in this paper is to focus attention on a certain conception of internal access, on the Cartesian conception that a rational subject's capacity to determine sameness and difference in explicit propositional attitudes is independent of knowledge of the external world. This conception of introspection plays a crucial, if unacknowledged, role in numerous arguments and theoretical positions. In particular, it plays a large role in motivating psychological internalism. I argue in favor…Read more
  •  226
    Content, causation, and psychophysical supervenience
    Philosophy of Science 60 (2): 242-61. 1993.
    There is a growing acceptance of the idea that the explanatory states of folk psychology do not supervene on the physical. Even Fodor (1987) seems to grant as much. He argues, however, that this cannot be true of theoretical psychology. Since theoretical psychology offers causal explanations, its explanatory states must be taxonomized in such a way as to supervene on the physical. I use this concession to invert his argument and cast doubt on the received model of folk psychological explanation …Read more
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