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10Persistence, composition and time: issues in theoretical diversityDissertation, University of Queensland. 2005.
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2Pretence fictionalism about the non-presentInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 67 (6): 1825-1859. 2024.Presentists hold that only present things exist. But we all, presentists included, utter sentences that appear to involve quantification over non-present objects, and so we all, presentists included, seem to commit ourselves to such objects. Equally, we all, presentists included, take utterances of many past-tensed (and some future-tensed) sentences to be true. But if no past or future things exist, it’s hard to see how there can be anything that those utterances are about, which makes them true…Read more
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9Temporal dynamism and the persisting stable selfPhilosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.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 ha…Read more
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2Why don’t I experience the past or present as now? (Proceedings of the CAPE International Workshops, 2013. Part II: The CAPE International Conference “A Frontier of Philosophy of Time”)CAPE Studies in Applied Philosophy and Ethics Series 2 155-166. 2014.30th Nov. and 1st Dec. 2013 at Kyoto University. Organizer: Takeshi Sakon.
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131Mental Time Travel in Animals: The “When” of Mental Time TravelPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. forthcoming.While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct tem…Read more
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145Personal-identity Non-cognitivismAnalytic 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.
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130The Moving Open Future, Temporal Phenomenology, and Temporal PassageAsian 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
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128Locative grounding harmonyPhilosophical 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
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103Is present-bias a distinctive psychological kind?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
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127Is future bias a manifestation of the temporal value asymmetry?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
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178Episodic Imagining, Temporal Experience, and Beliefs about TimePhilosophy 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
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157Temporal Dynamism and the Persisting Stable SelfThe Philosophical Quarterly. forthcoming.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
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145Several 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
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47Counterpart theory: metaphysical modal normativism by another nameInquiry: 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
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167The implicit decision theory of non-philosophersSynthese 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
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185Locating Temporal Passage in a Block WorldErgo: 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
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197On the idea that all future tensed contingents are falseAnalytic Philosophy 1. 2024.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
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119On Explaining Temporally Asymmetric ExperiencesAustralasian 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
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206Many 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
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112Against Passage IllusionismErgo: 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
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12I'm dating my sister, and other TaboosIn Fritz Allhoff, Kristie Miller & Marlene Clark (eds.), Dating ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-09-24.This chapter contains sections titled: Mere Social Conventions Pseudo‐Pathologies Pathologies and Decisions Pathology and Utility.
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4Flirting with Big IdeasIn Fritz Allhoff, Kristie Miller & Marlene Clark (eds.), Dating ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-09-24.
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74On Metaphysical AnalysisIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A companion to David Lewis, Wiley-blackwell. 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
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78Ontology, ‘Existence’ and The Role of IntuitionIn Kanzian Christian (ed.), Persistence, Ontos. pp. 103-118. 2007.Metaphysicians frequently appeal to intuition. But when is that appeal useful? I consider that question by focusing on our existential intuitions. In particular, I want to go some way to answering the question of whether, and when, appeal to existential intuitions is useful, by consid-ering the issue in the light of an argument for unrestricted composition. This argument appeals to a difference in the extent to which restricted and unrestricted compositionalists appeal to existential intuitions,…Read more
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101Anything I Can Do (With Respect to Truthmaking), You Can Do Better (or Just As Well): Truthmaking and Non-Presentist DynamismPhilosophical Issues 27 (1): 184-203. 2017.Let us call non-presentist dynamism any view according to which (a) a single moment of time is objectively present and (b) which time is objectively present changes and (c) objectively non-present times exist, and at least some of these are occupied by objects, events, or properties. Non-presentist dynamism has an advantage over presentist dynamism—the view that only present objects, properties, and events exist, and that which objects, properties and events there are, changes—in the truthmaking…Read more
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448Much ado about aboutnessInquiry: 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
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306Can we turn people into pain pumps?: On the Rationality of Future Bias and Strong Risk AversionJournal of Moral Philosophy 1 1-32. 2023.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
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26Correction to: Against a normative asymmetry between near- and future-biasSynthese 201 (5): 1-2. 2023.