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Youssef Mogtader und Gregor Schoeler, Turandot. Die persische Märchenerzählung. Edition, Übersetzung, Kommentar, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2017, 134 + 57 S., ISBN 978-3-95490-283-5.Turandot. Die persische Märchenerzählung. Edition, Übersetzung, Kommentar (review)Der Islam: Journal of the History and Culture of the Middle East 98 (1): 277-281. 2021.
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109The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as FarceJournal of Consciousness Studies 27 (11-12): 145-153. 2020.
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109Whose Preferences?American Journal of Bioethics 20 (8): 65-66. 2020.Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 65-66.
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141Transformative Experience and the Problem of Religious DisagreementIn Matthew A. Benton & Jonathan L. Kvanvig (eds.), Religious Disagreement and Pluralism, . forthcoming.Peer disagreement presents religious believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike with an epistemological problem: how can confidence in any religious claims (including their negations) be epistemically justified? There seem to be rational, well-informed adherents among a variety of mutually incompatible religious and non-religious perspectives, and so the problem of disagreement arises acutely in the religious domain. In this paper, we show that the transformative nature of religious experience and…Read more
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11Précis of "Transformative Experience"Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 10 (3): 313-319. 2019.
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Les révélations de la mer Morte. Un bilan du cinquantenaireNouvelle Revue Théologique 121 (2): 197-217. 1999.
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259Causation and Counterfactuals (edited book)MIT Press. 2004.Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting—or, in some cases, disputing the connection ...
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213The Context of EssenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (1): 170. 2004.I address two related questions: first, what is the best theory of how objects have de re modal properties? Second, what is the best defence of essentialism given the variability of our modal intuitions? I critically discuss several theories of how objects have their de re modal properties and address the most threatening antiessentialist objection to essentialism: the variability of our modal intuitions. Drawing on linguistic treatments of vagueness and ambiguity, I show how essentialists can a…Read more
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435Counterfactuals and causation: history, problems, and prospectsIn John Collins, Ned Hall & Laurie Paul (eds.), Causation and Counterfactuals, Mit Press. pp. 1--57. 2004.Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, but: ha…Read more
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193II—L. A. Paul: Categorical Priority and Categorical CollapseAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (1): 89-113. 2013.I explore some of the ways that assumptions about the nature of substance shape metaphysical debates about the structure of Reality. Assumptions about the priority of substance play a role in an argument for monism, are embedded in certain pluralist metaphysical treatments of laws of nature, and are central to discussions of substantivalism and relationalism. I will then argue that we should reject such assumptions and collapse the categorical distinction between substance and property.
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21A comprehensive meta-analysis of money primingJournal of Experimental Psychology: General 148 (4): 688-712. 2019.
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Essays on CausationDissertation, Princeton University. 1999.The dissertation consists of three chapters on causation. I explore problems with extant reductive analyses and construct alternative accounts in order to develop a better understanding of topics that are of central importance to our understanding of causation, such as the nature of events, the transitivity of the causal relation, the determination of the correct causal relata, and the different kinds of dependence of effects on their causes. ;In the first chapter, I argue that counterfactual an…Read more
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4Counterfactual theoriesIn Helen Beebee, Peter Menzies & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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138Causation and preemptionIn Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of Science Today, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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133The Worm at the Root of the Passions: Poetry and Sympathy in Mill's Utilitarianism: L. A. PaulUtilitas 10 (1): 83-104. 1998.I claim that Mill has a theory of poetry which he uses to reconcile nineteenth century associationist psychology, the tendency of the intellect to dissolve associations, and the need for educated members of society to desire utilitarian ends. The heart of the argument is that Mill thinks reading poetry encourages us to feel the feelings of others, and thus to develop pleasurable associations with the pleasurable feelings of others and painful associations with the painful feelings of others. Onc…Read more
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297Aspect CausationJournal of Philosophy 97 (4): 235. 2000.A theory of the causal relate as aspects or property instances is developed. A supposed problem for transitivity is assessed and then resolved with aspects as the causal relata.
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328A One Category OntologyIn John A. Keller (ed.), Being, Freedom, and Method: Themes From the Philosophy of Peter van Inwagen, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between p…Read more
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123Transformative ExperienceOxford University Press. 2014.How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L. A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.
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236A New Role for Experimental Work in MetaphysicsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (3): 461-476. 2010.Recent work in philosophy could benefit from paying greater attention to empirical results from cognitive science involving judgments about the nature of our ordinary experience. This paper describes the way that experimental and theoretical results about the nature of ordinary judgments could—and should—inform certain sorts of enquiries in contemporary philosophy, using metaphysics as an exemplar, and hence defines a new way for experimental philosophy and cognitive science to contribute to tra…Read more
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139Constitutive OverdeterminationIn J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. S. Silverstein (eds.), Causation and Explanation, Mit Press. pp. 4--265. 2007.Our best philosophical and scientific pictures of the world organize material objects into a hierarchy or levels or layers- microparticles at the bottom, molecules, cells, and persons at higher layers. Are objects at higher layers identical to the sums of objects at lower layers that constitute them? (Note that this question is different from the question of whether composition- as opposed to constitution- is identity.)
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371The Subjectively Enduring SelfIn Ian Phillips (ed.), Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Temporal Experience, Routledge. forthcoming.The self can be understood in objective metaphysical terms as a bundle of properties, as a substance, or as some other kind of entity on our metaphysical list of what there is. Such an approach explores the metaphysical nature of the self when regarded from a suitably impersonal, ontological perspective. It explores the nature and structure of the self in objective reality, that is, the nature and structure of the self from without. This is the objective self. I am taking a different approach. I…Read more
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78Realism about Structure and KindsIn Stephen Mumford & Matthew Tugby (eds.), Metaphysics and Science, Oxford University Press. 2013.In 1976, Hilary Putnam set forth his model-theoretic argument, claiming that it showed that the semantic realist’s program1 was ‘unintelligible’, since it implied, contra the realist view, that reference is radically indeterminate. Although I find the conclusion that reference is indeterminate unattractive, I argue that the descriptivist position needs to be supplemented with a premise about the sorts of kinds or structure that our world includes. The need for this premise gives a counterintuiti…Read more
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207Limited realism: Cartwright on natures and lawsPhilosophical Books 43 244-253. 2002.A leaf falls to the ground, wafting lazily on the afternoon breeze. Clouds move across the sky, and birds sing. Are these events governed by universal laws of nature, laws that apply everywhere without exception, subsuming events such as the falling of the leaf, the movement of the clouds and the singing of the birds? Are such laws part of a small set of fundamental laws, or descended from such a set, which govern everything there is in the world?
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398Building the world from its fundamental constituentsPhilosophical Studies 158 (2): 221-256. 2012.In this paper, I argue that the spatiotemporalist approach way of modeling the fundamental constituents, structure, and composition of the world has taken a wrong turn. Spatiotemporalist approaches to fundamental structure take the fundamental nature of the world to be spatiotemporal: they take the category of spatiotemporal to be fundamental. I argue that the debates over the nature of the fundamental space in the physics show us that (i) the fact that it is conceivable that the manifest world …Read more
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