University of Queensland
School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry
PhD, 2005
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy
Metaphysics
  •  49
    Personal-identity Non-cognitivism
    Analytic Philosophy. forthcoming.
    In this paper I outline and defend a new approach to personal-identity—personal-identity non-cognitivism—and argue that it has several advantages over its cognitivist rivals. On this view utterances of personal-identity sentences express a non-cognitive attitude towards relevant person-stages. The resulting view offers a pleasingly nuanced picture of what we are doing when we utter such sentences.
  •  37
    The Moving Open Future, Temporal Phenomenology, and Temporal Passage
    with Batoul Hodroj and Andrew J. Latham
    Asian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Empirical evidence suggests that people naïvely represent time as dynamical (i.e. as containing robust temporal passage). Yet many contemporary B-theorists deny that it seems to us, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. The question then arises as to why we represent time as dynamical if we do not have perceptual experiences which represent time as dynamical. We consider two hypotheses about why this might be: the temporally asperspectival replacement hypothesis and the movin…Read more
  •  62
    Locative grounding harmony
    Philosophical Studies. forthcoming.
    In this paper, we explore locative grounding harmony, according to which the location of the grounds mirrors the location of the grounded. We proceed in three stages. First, we clarify the notion of locative harmony and describe different locative harmony principles. Second, we offer two arguments for the claim that grounding between physically located entities obeys principles of locative harmony. Third, we consider and respond to a range of cases that seem to show that grounding relations betw…Read more
  •  13
    Is present-bias a distinctive psychological kind?
    with Natalja Deng, Batoul Hodroj, Andrew J. Latham, and Jordan Lee-Tory
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Present-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive events to be located in the present rather than the non-present, and for negative events to be located in the non-present rather than the present. Very little attention has been given to present-bias in the contemporary literature on time biases. This may be because it is often assumed that present-bias is not a distinctive psychological kind; that what explains people’s being present-biased is just what explains them displaying …Read more
  •  51
    Is future bias a manifestation of the temporal value asymmetry?
    with Eugene Caruso and Andrew J. Latham
    Philosophical Psychology. forthcoming.
    Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive states of affairs to be located in the future not the past, and for negative states of affairs to be located in the past not the future. Three explanations for future-bias have been posited: the temporal metaphysics explanation, the practical irrelevance explanation, and the three mechanisms explanation. Understanding what explains future-bias is important not only for better understanding the phenomenon itself, but also because m…Read more
  •  99
    Episodic Imagining, Temporal Experience, and Beliefs about Time
    with Anthony Bigg, Andrew J. Latham, and Shira Yechimovitz
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    We explore the role of episodic imagining in explaining why people both differentially report that it seems to them in experience as though time robustly passes, and why they differentially report that they believe that time does in fact robustly pass. We empirically investigate two hypotheses, the differential vividness hypothesis, and the mental time travel hypothesis. According to each of these, the degree to which people vividly episodically imagine past/future states of affairs influences t…Read more
  •  96
    Empirical evidence suggests that a majority of people believe that time robustly passes, and that many also report that it seems to them, in experience, as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists deny that time robustly passes, and many contemporary non-dynamists—deflationists—even deny that it seems to us as though time robustly passes. Non-dynamists, then, face the dual challenge of explaining why people have such beliefs and make such reports about their experiences. Several philosophers h…Read more
  •  83
    Several philosophers have suggested that certain aspects of people’s experience of agency partly explains why people tend to report that it seems to them, in perceptual experience, as though time robustly passes. In turn, it has been suggested that people come to believe that time robustly passes on the basis of its seeming to them in experience that it does. We argue that what require explaining is not just that people report that it seems to them as though time robustly passes, and that they …Read more
  •  22
    Counterpart theory: metaphysical modal normativism by another name
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 1. 2023.
    In this paper, I argue that not only is metaphysical modal normativism an attractive view but that, as a matter of fact, many of us have, all along, been metaphysical modal normativists of a particular stripe. Namely, we have been the kinds of modal normativists, in the form of counterpart theorists, who are robust realists about possibility simpliciter. Having introduced modal normativism as Thomasson does in Norms and Necessity, I go on to recast it in somewhat different terms. With this re-ca…Read more
  •  94
    The implicit decision theory of non-philosophers
    with Preston Greene, Andrew Latham, and Michael Nielsen
    Synthese 203 (2): 1-23. 2024.
    This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something _as a news item_ and preferring it _as an object of choice_. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people’s im…Read more
  •  310
    Locating Temporal Passage in a Block World
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.
    This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied in our wor…Read more
  •  132
    In “The Open Future” (2021) Patrick Todd argues that the future is open, and that as a consequence all future contingents are false (as opposed to the more common view that they are neither true nor false). Very roughly, this latter claim is motivated by the idea that (a) presentism is true, and so future (and indeed past) things do not exist and (b) if future things do not exist, then the only thing that could ground there being future tensed facts, and hence make those future tensed claims tr…Read more
  •  30
    On Explaining Temporally Asymmetric Experiences
    Australasian Philosophical Review. forthcoming.
    Ismael aims for an understanding of the nature of an embedded perspective of agents in a world. If successful, this would explain a cluster of ways in which from an embedded perspective, we experience the world in an array of temporally asymmetric ways. Moreover, these are ways that have led many philosophers to rather metaphysically inflationary views about the nature of time, according to which time itself really is dynamical, and is characterized by the movement of an objectively (i.e., non-p…Read more
  •  139
    Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects pe…Read more
  •  42
    Against Passage Illusionism
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (n/a). 2022.
    Temporal dynamists typically hold that it seems to us as though time robustly passes, and that its seeming so is explained by the fact that time does robustly pass. Temporal non-dynamists hold that time does not robustly pass. Some non-dynamists nevertheless hold that it seems as though it does: we have an illusory phenomenal state whose content represents robust passage. Call these phenomenal passage illusionists. Other non-dynamists argue that the phenomenal state in question is veridical and …Read more
  •  1
    Dating ‐ Philosophy for Everyone (edited book)
    with Fritz Allhoff and Marlene Clark
    Wiley‐Blackwell. 2010-09-24.
  •  5
    I'm dating my sister, and other Taboos
    In Fritz Allhoff, Kristie Miller & Marlene Clark (eds.), Dating ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Mere Social Conventions Pseudo‐Pathologies Pathologies and Decisions Pathology and Utility.
  •  1
    Flirting with Big Ideas
    with Marlene Clark
    In Fritz Allhoff, Kristie Miller & Marlene Clark (eds.), Dating ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
  •  6
    On Metaphysical Analysis
    In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.
    Metaphysics is largely an a priori business, albeit a business that is sensitive to the findings of the physical sciences. This chapter has two aims. The first is to defend a particular conception of the methodology of a priori metaphysics by, in part, exemplifying that methodology and revealing its results. The second is to present a new account of holes. These two aims dovetail nicely. The chapter provides a better analysis of the concept ′hole′ that yields a more plausible metaphysical story …Read more
  •  6
    Ontology, ‘Existence’ and The Role of Intuition
    In Kanzian Christian (ed.), Persistence, Ontos. pp. 103-118. 2007.
  •  379
    Much ado about aboutness
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (3). 2019.
    Strong non-maximalism holds that some truths require no ontological ground of any sort. Strong non-maximalism allows one to accept that some propositions are true without being forced to endorse any corresponding ontological commitments. We show that there is a version of truthmaker theory available—anti-aboutness truthmaking—that enjoys the dialectical benefits of the strong non-maximalist’s position. According to anti-aboutness truthmaking, all truths require grounds, but a proposition need no…Read more
  •  186
    Future-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for negatively valenced events be located in the past rather than the future, and positively valenced ones to be located in the future rather than the past. Strong risk aversion is the preference to pay some cost to mitigate the badness of the worst outcome. People who are both strongly risk averse and future-biased can face a series of choices that will guarantee them more pain, for no compensating benefit: they will be pain pumped. Thus, com…Read more
  •  11
    Times, Locations and the Epistemic Objection
    Disputatio 13 (63): 385-398. 2021.
    Very roughly, the epistemic objection to the growing block theory (GBT) says that according to that theory there are many past times at which persons falsely believe they are present. Since there is nothing subjectively distinguishable about a situation in which one truly believes one is present, from a situation in which one falsely believes one is present, the GBT is a theory on which we cannot know that we are present. In their articulation and defence of the GBT, Correia and Rosenkranz (C&R)…Read more
  •  306
    The Triviality Argument against presentism maintains that we should reject presentism because there is no way to define the view that is not either trivially true or obviously false. We suggest that this style of argument over-emphasises purely linguistic means of representing a philosophical thesis. We argue that there is no reason to suppose that all philosophical theses must be linguistically representable, and thus that the failure to linguistically represent presentism is no big deal. It ce…Read more
  •  29
    Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion: Toward a Widespread Non-factualism
    Philosophical Review 131 (3): 386-390. 2022.
    In Metaphysics, Sophistry, and Illusion, Mark Balaguer defenders what he calls neopositivism.Neopositivism is the view that metaphysical questions completely decompose into ordinary empirical questions that can be answered by scientific inquiry (empirical) or ordinary logical or modal questions, which can be answered by appeal to a metaphysically innocent modalism (modal innocence) or questions that are nonfactual—that is, questions that are such that the world does not provide the question with…Read more
  •  181
    Exploring Arbitrariness Objections to Time-Biases
    with Andrew J. Latham, Jordan Oh, Sam Shpall, and Wen Yu
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association. forthcoming.
    There are two kinds of time-bias: near-bias and future-bias. While philosophers typically hold that near-bias is rationally impermissible, many hold that future-bias is rationally permissible. Call this normative hybridism. According to arbitrariness objections, certain patterns of preference are rationally impermissible because they are arbitrary. While arbitrariness objections have been levelled against both near-bias and future-bias, the kind of arbitrariness in question has been different. I…Read more
  •  497
    Non‐cognitivism about Metaphysical explanation
    Analytic Philosophy 64 (2): 1-20. 2022.
    This article introduces a non‐cognitivist account of metaphysical explanation according to which the core function of judgements of the form ⌜x because y⌝ is not to state truth‐apt beliefs. Instead, their core function is to express attitudes of commitment to, and recommendation of the acceptance of certain norms governing interventional conduct at contexts.