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On the Continuation of Material BeingDissertation, University of Washington. 1999.Descartes claims that the continued existence of material things is due the continuing action of Gods will. Such appeals to the divine, however, are rarely made by contemporary writers, but neither is any substitute explanation currently offered. I seek to fill this void by examining the relationship between one moment of material being and another. In particular, given a single material being at a single moment of time, what, if anything, ensures that there will exist any material thing at a la…Read more
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17Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the BodyJournal of Nietzsche Studies 36 (1): 192-194. 2008.
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12Is There a Principle of Continued Material Being?Process Studies 51 (2): 221-244. 2022.What is the relation of an earlier being to a later such that given the earlier there is or will be a later? I call this the question of material continuation. To answer, I offer a review of several philosophers’ thoughts, including those of Zeno, Aristotle, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead. While there is considerable variety among the ontological views of these philosophers, and indeed some direct opposition of both method and assertion, my review suggests…Read more
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37The Continuation of Material Being in Seibt's Process TheoryProcess Studies 46 (2): 157-185. 2017.I call "material continuation" the fact of one material thing or event being followed by another in time. In this article, I address the question why material continuation obtains, as it seems to do. Johanna Seibt's theory of dynamism promises to explain material continuation by reference to Aristotle's concept of energeia. I argue that her account fails to explain how one thing at one time might be followed by another at another.
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45Understanding UnderstandingTeaching Philosophy 39 (3): 291-306. 2016.Drawing on the basic philosophy of mind of the modern period, I offer a means of improving clarity of student written thought. Clarity of thought entails the sort of concept-sensation synthesis central to Kant’s account of human experience: or in more recent terminology, to be clear is to recognize the intention of a concept in a member of its extension. Simple analysis of concepts and of the mental state of understanding reveals structures that can help diagnose and repair conceptual weakness. …Read more
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39Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View (review)Journal of Nietzsche Studies 41 (1): 127-129. 2011.
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23Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (review)Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35 (1): 192-194. 2008.
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24What Plato Knew About EnronJournal of Business Ethics 86 (4): 463-471. 2009.This paper applies Plato’s cave allegory to Enron’s success and downfall. Plato’s famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato’s cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato’s levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created it…Read more
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25Antinomy of Truth and ReasonTeaching Philosophy 28 (1): 31-43. 2005.Many students find themselves caught in an antinomy between “Rationalism”, a view of the world as open to objective, complete, and intellectual comprehension, and “Anti-realism”, the view that the Rationalist vision is façade since there is no objective perspective and any “truth” is relative to the individual. This paper offers a description of an introductory course that provides conceptual resources (through the use of Descartes, Hume, and Kant) for resolving the Rationalism-Antirealism debat…Read more
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62Can Indirect Causation be Real?Metaphysica 8 (2): 111-122. 2007.Causal realists maintain that the causal relation consists in something more than its relata. Specifying this relation in nonreductive terms is however notoriously difficult. Michael Tooley has advanced a plausible account avoiding some of the relationâs most obvious difficulties, particularly where these concern the notion of a cross-temporal connection. His account distinguishes discrete from nondiscrete causation, where the latter is suitable to the continuity of cross-temporal causation. I…Read more
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89Perdurance and causal realismErkenntnis 60 (2): 205-227. 2004.While there has been considerable recent criticism of perdurance theory in connection with a Humean understanding of causality, perdurance theory conjoined with causal realism has received relatively little attention. One might, then, form the impression that perdurance theory under the auspices of causal realism is a relatively safe view. I shall argue, however, to the contrary. My general strategy is to show that there is no plausible way of spelling out the perdurance position (of the non-Hum…Read more
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