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30Philosophy of science today (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2003.Philosophy of Science Today offers a state-of-the-art guide to this fast-developing area. An eminent international team of authors covers a wide range of topics at the intersection of philosophy and the sciences, including causation, realism, methodology, epistemology, and the philosophical foundations of physics, biology, and psychology.
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21Applied MetaphysicsIn Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.Metaphysics can be used to help us understand the world, and has applications both within philosophy and beyond. Within philosophy, metaphysical questions arise whether we are thinking about ethics, art, religion, or science. Beyond philosophy, there are many areas where metaphysics can be applied. Case studies in this chapter include applied ontology in information science, social ontology in both philosophy and the social sciences, and questions about classification and kinds in psychiatry.
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585Trust, Distrust and CommitmentNoûs 48 (1): 1-20. 2014.I outline a number of parallels between trust and distrust, emphasising the significance of situations in which both trust and distrust would be an imposition upon the (dis)trustee. I develop an account of both trust and distrust in terms of commitment, and argue that this enables us to understand the nature of trustworthiness. Note that this article is available open access on the journal website.
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73Review of The Logical Structure of Kinds by Eric Funkhouser (review)Philosophical Quarterly 66 (264): 644-646. 2016.Review of The Logical Structure of Kinds. By Eric Funkhouser.
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Almost Identical, Almost InnocentIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
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3Using Independent Study Groups with Philosophy StudentsDiscourse: Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies 2 (1): 90-109. 2002.
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103Review of James W. McAllister: Beauty & revolution in science (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 297-299. 1997.Review of Beauty and Revolution in Science, by JW McAllister.
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36How to Be TrustworthyOxford University Press. 2019.Katherine Hawley investigates what trustworthiness means in our lives. We become untrustworthy when we break promises, miss deadlines, or give unreliable information. But we can't be sure about what we can commit to. Hawley examines the social obstacles to trustworthiness, and explores how we can steer between overcommitment and undercommitment.
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52Comments on Ontology Made Easy by Amie ThomassonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (1): 229-235. 2019.
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257I—What Is Impostor Syndrome?Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93 (1): 203-226. 2019.People are described as suffering from impostor syndrome when they feel that their external markers of success are unwarranted, and fear being revealed as a fraud. Impostor syndrome is commonly framed as a troubling individual pathology, to be overcome through self-help strategies or therapy. But in many situations an individual’s impostor attitudes can be epistemically justified, even if they are factually mistaken: hostile social environments can create epistemic obstacles to self-knowledge. T…Read more
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37How do things persist? Are material objects spread out through time just as they are spread out through space? Or is temporal persistence quite different from spatial extension? This key question lies at the heart of any metaphysical exploration of the material world, and it plays a crucial part in debates about personal identity and survival. This book explores and compares three theories of persistence — endurance, perdurance, and stage theories — investigating the ways in which they attempt t…Read more
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40Trustworthy groups and organisationsIn P. Faulkner & T. Simpson (eds.), The Philosophy of Trust, Oxford University Press. 2017.Beyond philosophy, discussions of trust and trustworthiness often concern collective entities such as corporations, states, and social groups. But much philosophical work takes trust in an individual person as paradigmatic, distinguishing such trust from mere reliance. This chapter explores the distinction between trustworthiness and mere reliability as it applies to collectives, arguing that the distinction does not have the same significance as it has in the individual case.
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165Comments on Brian Epstein’s The Ant TrapInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (2): 217-229. 2019.ABSTRACTThe Ant Trap is a terrific book, which opens up new opportunities to use philosophical methods in the social realm, by drawing on the tools and techniques of contemporary metaphysics. Epstein uses concepts of dependence, constitution, and grounding, of parts and whole, of membership and kindhood, both to clarify existing accounts of social reality and to develop an account of his own. Whilst I admire the general strategy, I take issue with some aspects of Epstein’s implementation, notabl…Read more
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178Conspiracy theories, impostor syndrome, and distrustPhilosophical Studies 176 (4): 969-980. 2019.Conspiracy theorists believe that powerful agents are conspiring to achieve their nefarious aims and also to orchestrate a cover-up. People who suffer from impostor syndrome believe that they are not talented enough for the professional positions they find themselves in, and that they risk being revealed as inadequate. These are quite different outlooks on reality, and there is no reason to think that they are mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, there are intriguing parallels between the pattern…Read more
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67Trust, distrust and epistemic injusticeIn Ian James Kidd & José Medina (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, Routledge. 2017.
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74Almost Identical, Almost InnocentRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82 249-263. 2017.In his 1991 book, Parts of Classes, David Lewis discusses the idea that composition is identity, alongside the idea that mereological overlap is a form of partial identity. But this notion of partial identity does nothing to help Lewis achieve his goals in that book. So why does he mention it? I explore and resolve this puzzle, by comparing Parts of Classes with Lewis's invocation of partial identity in his 1993 paper ‘Many But Almost One’, where he uses it to address Unger's problem of the many…Read more
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267Social MereologyJournal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (4): 395-411. 2017.What kind of entity is a committee, a book group or a band? I argue that committees and other such social groups are concrete, composite particulars, having ordinary human beings amongst their parts. So the committee members are literally parts of the committee. This mereological view of social groups was popular several decades ago, but fell out of favour following influential objections from David-Hillel Ruben. But recent years have seen a tidal wave of work in metaphysics, including the metap…Read more
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112Social Science as a Guide to Social Metaphysics?Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 49 (2): 187-198. 2018.If we are sympathetic to the project of naturalising metaphysics, how should we approach the metaphysics of the social world? What role can the social sciences play in metaphysical investigation? In the light of these questions, this paper examines three possible approaches to social metaphysics: inference to the best explanation from current social science, conceptual analysis, and Haslanger-inspired ameliorative projects.
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13Fission, Fusion and Intrinsic Facts1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (3): 602-621. 2007.Closest‐continuer or best‐candidate accounts of persistence seem deeply unsatisfactory, but it is hard to say why. the standard criticism is that such accounts violate the ‘only a and b’ rule, but this criticism merely highlights a feature of the accounts without explaining why the feature is unacceptable. Another concern is that such accounts violate some principle about the supervenience of persistence facts upon local or intrinsic facts. But, again, we do not seem to have an independent justi…Read more
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10Review of Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology, Modality, & the Relations Between Them. By Bob Hale. Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 320, £40. ISBN: 978-0-19-966957-8.
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1427Ontological InnocenceIn A. J. Cotnoir & Donald L. M. Baxter (eds.), Composition as Identity, Oxford University Press. pp. 70-89. 2014.In this chapter, I examine Lewis's ideas about ontological innocence, ontological commitment and double-counting, in his discussion of composition as identity in Parts of Classes. I attempt to understand these primarily as epistemic or methodological claims: how far can we get down this route without adopting radical metaphysical theses about composition as identity?
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183Knowing How and Epistemic InjusticeIn John Bengson & Marc A. Moffett (eds.), Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, Oxford University Press. pp. 283-99. 2011.In this chapter I explore how epistemic injustice (as discussed by Miranda Fricker) can arise in connection with knowledge how. I attempt to bypass the question of whether knowledge how is a type of propositional knowledge, and instead focus on some distinctive ways in which knowledge how is sometimes sought, identified or ignored.
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271Fission, fusion and intrinsic factsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (3): 602-621. 2005.Closest-continuer or best-candidate accounts of persistence seem deeply unsatisfactory, but it’s hard to say why. The standard criticism is that such accounts violate the ‘only a and b’ rule, but this criticism merely highlights a feature of the accounts without explaining why the feature is unacceptable. Another concern is that such accounts violate some principle about the supervenience of persistence facts upon local or intrinsic facts. But, again, we do not seem to have an independent justif…Read more
St Andrews, FIfe, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |