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Christianity and the Extended-Mind ThesisIn J. B. Stump & Alan G. Padgett (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 491-499. 2012.This chapter contains sections titled: * Two Versions of the Extended-Mind Thesis * Extended Systems and Christianity * Extended Cognition and Christianity * The Upshot * Conclusion * References * Further Reading
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4Death and the AfterlifeIn William J. Wainwright (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of religion, Oxford University Press. 2005.Monotheistic conceptions of an afterlife raise a philosophical question: In virtue of what is a postmortem person the same person who lived and died? Four standard answers are surveyed and criticized: sameness of soul, sameness of body or brain, sameness of soul-body composite, sameness of memories. The discussion of these answers to the question of personal identity is followed by a development of my own view, the Constitution View. According to the Constitution View, you are a person in virtue…Read more
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Selfless persons: Goodness in an impersonal world?In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Mind, Self and Person, Cambridge University Press. 2015.
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16. Reason and ReligionIn Maria Cristina Amoretti & Nicla Vassallo (eds.), Reason and Rationality, Ontos Verlag. pp. 129-148. 2012.
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8ConstitutionalismIn Jonathan J. Loose, Angus John Louis Menuge & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.This chapter deals with a brief word about the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. The doctrine of the Incarnation, which takes Jesus Christ to be a person fully human and fully divine, requires a slight modification of constitutionalism. Constitutionalism seems to have an advantage over mind‐body dualism about Christ's nature: his human nature is wholly material and his divine nature is wholly immaterial. The chapter also focuses on Christian doctrines of resurrection of the dead. Next, it discu…Read more
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4Ontology and Ordinary ObjectsIn Christian Kanzian, Winfried Löffler & Josef Quitterer (eds.), The Ways Things Are: Studies in Ontology, Ontos. pp. 167-180. 2011.
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44Lynne Rudder Baker, Review of Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind by John Haugeland (review)Philosophy of Science 66 (3): 494-495. 1999.
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1Materialism with a Homan FaceIn Kevin Corcoran (ed.), Soul, body, and survival: essays on the metaphysics of human persons, Cornell University Press. 2001.
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211Christian materialism in a scientific ageInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 70 (1): 47-59. 2011.Many Christians who argue against Christian materialism direct their arguments against what I call ‘Type-I materialism’, the thesis that I cannot exist without my organic body. I distinguish Type-I materialism from Type-II materialism, which entails only that I cannot exist without some body that supports certain mental functions. I set out a version of Type-II materialism, and argue for its superiority to Type-I materialism in an age of science. Moreover, I show that Type-II materialism can acc…Read more
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When does a person begin?In John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics, Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.
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The ontological status of personsIn John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics, Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.
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1The Threat of Cognitive SuicideIn John Heil (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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68On the mind-dependence of temporal becomingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (3): 341-357. 1979.
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74RepliesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (3): 623-635. 2002.Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.
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289Making sense of ourselves: self-narratives and personal identityPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (1): 7-15. 2016.Some philosophers take personal identity to be a matter of self-narrative. I argue, to the contrary, that self-narrative views cannot stand alone as views of personal identity. First, I consider Dennett’s self-narrative view, according to which selves are fictional characters—abstractions, like centers of gravity—generated by brains. Neural activity is to be interpreted from the intentional stance as producing a story. I argue that this is implausible. The inadequacy is masked by Dennett’s ambig…Read more
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5Thought and Object: Essays on IntentionalityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1): 137-142. 1984.
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11Autism and 'I'Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (11-12): 180-193. 2015.After summarizing my own views of 'I' and the first-person perspective, I consider a well-known autistic, Temple Grandin, who claims that she thinks only in pictures, not in language. I argue, to the contrary, that Grandin's mental life as she describes it in fact requires language, which, as a writer, she undoubtedly has. Finally, I turn to the question of whether thought as Temple Grandin describes it is independent of language.
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107The First-Person PerspectivePhilosophia Christi 20 (1): 61-66. 2018.Baker rejects naturalistic views that exclude first-person facts. Persons are emergent, constituted entities having first-person perspectives that are ineliminable, first-personal, dispositional, multi-stage properties. Persons appear gradually with FPPs in the rudimentary stage, but are distinguished by the later, robust stage. We possess first-person perspectives essentially and thereby have first-personal persistence conditions. Transtemporal identity is unanalyzable, requiring a variant of t…Read more
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12Practical Realism as MetaphysicsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 51 (4): 297-304. 2014.Mainstream analytic metaphysics is a priori metaphysics. It is hemmed in by basic assumptions that rest on no more than a priori intuitions. Jaegwon Kim's arguments about causation are a paradigm example of sophisticated arguments with little or no justification from the world as we know it. And Peter van Inwagen's arguments about material objects are motivated by a question that, I think, has no nontrivial answer: Under what conditions do some x's compose an object y? The trivial answers are "a…Read more
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13Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (edited book)Princeton University Press. 1987.This stimulating book critically examines a wide range of physicalistic conceptions of mind in the works of Jerry A. Fodor, Stephen P. Stich, Paul M. Churchland, Daniel C. Dennett, and others. Part I argues that intentional concepts cannot be reduced to nonintentional concepts; Part II argues that intentional concepts are nevertheless indispensable to our cognitive enterprises and thus need no foundation in physicalism. As a sustained challenge to the prevailing interpretation of cognitive scien…Read more
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217. The Threat of Cognitive SuicideIn Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, Princeton University Press. pp. 134-148. 1987.
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48. Instrumentalism: Back from the Brink?In Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, Princeton University Press. pp. 149-166. 1987.
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81. Common Sense and PhysicalismIn Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, Princeton University Press. pp. 1-20. 1987.
Amherst, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |