•  149
    First-Person Thought
    with Daniel Morgan
    Analysis 80 (1): 148-163. 2020.
    Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), d.
  •  40
    Depression, Ataraxia, and the Pig
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2): 251-266. 2023.
    What would happen if we succeeded in ‘turning down’ our emotional reactions? In this paper I compare two conditions that play out the answer to this question in very different ways—the lived experience of flattened affect characteristic of depression, and the idealised emotional restraint of the tranquil Epicurean ataraxic. I use this comparison to develop a new proposed source of value for the presence of emotion in our ordinary lives: it feels good to feel like oneself, and there are facts abo…Read more
  •  38
    Lit from Within: First-Person Thought and Illusions of Transcendence
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (6): 735-749. 2020.
    Philosophical treatments of the self in a range of different traditions have positioned it outside the realm of ordinary worldly objects. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this seemingly widespread and persistent temptation to mystify the self is that the epistemic properties of I-thought are apt to give rise to an illusion of transcendence about their objects—that is, about ourselves.
  •  7
    The Subjective Perspective in Introspection
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (3-4): 128-145. 2016.
    As an empirical example of introspective conditions in which the normal sense of self is disrupted, the delusion of thought insertion is of special interest to philosophers investigating the epistemic and phenomenological structures of introspection. A common strategy is to use immunity to error through misidentification as a tool with which to pick apart the implications of thought insertion for our understanding of the faculty of introspection. In this paper I turn that strategy on its head: I…Read more
  •  43
    The Essential Non-Indexical
    Philosophers' Imprint 19. 2019.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that our non-first-personal ways of thinking of ourselves – those we would naturally express in language without using first person pronouns – are just as important to our agency as our indexical ways of thinking of ourselves. They are just important in different ways. Specifically, I argue that a thinker who is systematically excluded from these non-first-personal modes of self-directed thought would be excluded from participation in some of the domains of agen…Read more
  •  96
    Talking our way to systematicity
    Philosophical Studies 176 (10): 2563-2588. 2019.
    Do we think in a language-like format? Taking the marker of language-like formats to be the property of unconstrained systematicity, this paper considers the following master argument for the claim that we do: language is unconstrainedly systematic, if language is unconstrainedly systematic then so is thought, so thought is unconstrainedly systematic. It is easy to feel that there is something right about this argument, that there will be some way of filling in its details that will vindicate th…Read more
  •  40
    Suppose that the following describes an intelligible scenario. A subject is wired up to another's body in such a way that she has bodily experiences ‘as from the inside’ caused by states and events in the other body, that are subjectively indistinguishable from ordinary somatosensory perception of her own body. The supposed intelligibility of such so-called crossed wire cases constitutes a significant challenge to the claim that our somatosensory judgements are immune to error through misidentif…Read more
  •  143
    Thinking About You
    Mind 126 (503): 817-840. 2016.
    This paper brings into focus the idea that just as no third-personal way of thinking could capture the self-consciousness of first-person thought, no first- or third- personal way of thinking could capture the especially intimate way we have of relating to each other canonically expressed with our uses of ‘you’. It proposes, motivates and defends the view that second-person speech is canonically expressive of a distinctive way we have of thinking of each other, under a concept that refers de jur…Read more
  •  25
    As an empirical example of introspective conditions in which the normal sense of self is disrupted, the delusion of thought insertion is of special interest to philosophers investigating the epistemic and phenomenological structures of introspection. A common strategy is to use immunity to error through misidentification as a tool with which to pick apart the implications of thought insertion for our understanding of the faculty of introspection. In this paper I turn that strategy on its head: I…Read more