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From Democrat to DissidentIn T. Allan Hillman & Tully Borland (eds.), Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 261-277. 2022.
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Against Democracy: New PrefacePrinceton University Press. 2016.
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Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2021.
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Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and HeideggerMIT Press. 2012.Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are two of the most important--and two of the most difficult--philosophers of the twentieth century, indelibly influencing the course of continental and analytic philosophy, respectively. In _ Groundless Grounds_, Lee Braver argues that the views of both thinkers emerge from a fundamental attempt to create a philosophy that has dispensed with everything transcendent so that we may be satisfied with the human. Examining the central topics of their thought …Read more
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Kant and the Principle of Sufficient ReasonReview of Metaphysics 74 (3). 2021.Leibniz, and many following him, saw the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) as pivotal to a scientific (demonstrated) metaphysics. Against this backdrop, Kant is expected to pay close attention to PSR in his reflections on the possibility of metaphysics, which is his chief concern in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is far from clear, however, what has become of PSR in the Critique. On one reading, Kant has simply turned it into the causal principle of the Second Analogy. On a different reading…Read more
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Taking the super out of the supernaturalZygon 42 (2): 356. 2007.Metaphysical dualities divorce humankind from its natural environment, dualities that can precipitate environmental disaster. Loyal Rue in Religion Is Not About God seeks to resolve the abstract modalities of religion and naturalism in a unified monistic ecocentric metaphysic characterized as religious naturalism. Rue puts forward proposals for a general naturalistic theory of religion, a theory that lays bare the structural and functional features of religious phenomena as the critical first st…Read more
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An Ecological Account of Visual 'Illusions'Florida Philosophical Review 16 (1): 68-93. 2016.
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A New Peircean Response to Radical SkepticismContemporary Pragmatism 15 (1): 15-22. 2018.The radical skeptic argues that I have no knowledge of things I ordinarily claim to know because I have no evidence for or against the possibility of being systematically fed illusions. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in pragmatic responses to skepticism inspired by C. S. Peirce. This essay challenges one such influential response and presents a better Peircean way to refute the skeptic. The account I develop holds that although I do not know whether the skeptical hypothesis is true, …Read more
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The future of artificial intelligence, posthumanism and the inflection of Pixley Isaka Seme’s African humanismAI and Society 37 (1): 131-141. 2022.Increasingly, innovation in artificial intelligence technologies portends the re-conceptualization of human existentiality along the paradigm of posthumanism. An exposition of this through a critical culturo-historical methodology uncloaks the Eurocentric genitive basis of the philosophical anthropology that underpins this technological posthumanism, as well as its dystopian possibilities. As a contribution to obviating the latter, an Africanist civilizational humanism proclaimed by Pixley ka Is…Read more
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A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. In parti…Read more
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Minds, brains, and programsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-57. 1980.What psychological and philosophical significance should we attach to recent efforts at computer simulations of human cognitive capacities? In answering this question, I find it useful to distinguish what I will call "strong" AI from "weak" or "cautious" AI. According to weak AI, the principal value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise fashion. But according to…Read more
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Peirce and Husserl: Mutual Insights on Logic, Mathematics and Cognition (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.This volume aims to provide the elements for a systematic exploration of certain fundamental notions of Peirce and Husserl in respect with foundations of science by means of drawing a parallelism between their works. Tackling a largely understudied comparison between these two contemporary philosophers, the authors highlight the significant similarities in some of their fundamental ideas. This volume consists of eleven chapters under four parts. The first part concerns methodologies and main pri…Read more
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Epistemological Luddism: Reinvigorating a Concept for Action in 21st Century Sociotechnical StrugglesSocial Epistemology 32 (4): 228-240. 2018.Explicitly dismantling or decommissioning existing sociotechnical systems seems to be unimaginable both within dominant public imaginaries and in academic thought. Indeed, ‘gee whiz’ journalistic narratives regarding emerging technoscience abound as many members of the public appear to eagerly await any new innovation coming out of Silicon Valley. At the same time, most science and technology studies (STS) research focuses on the creation of new technoscience, not its destruction or temporary de…Read more
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Language, Logic, and Mathematics in Schopenhauer (edited book)Birkhäuser. 2020.The chapters in this timely volume aim to answer the growing interest in Arthur Schopenhauer’s logic, mathematics, and philosophy of language by comprehensively exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. Thus, this work addresses the lack of research on these subjects in the context of Schopenhauer’s oeuvre by exposing their links to modern research areas, such as the “proof without words” movement, analytic philosophy and diagrammatic reasoning, demo…Read more
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Arthur Schopenhauer: Logic and DialecticInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2023.
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Unreliability and Point of View in Filmic NarrationEpistemology and Philosophy of Science 59 (2): 23-37. 2022.Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kin…Read more
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The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human ValuesPhilosophy Now 90 42-44. 2012.
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Robot Ethics 2. 0: New Challenges in Philosophy, Law, and Society (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.
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An Introduction to MetametaphysicsCambridge University Press. 2015.How do we come to know metaphysical truths? How does metaphysical inquiry work? Are metaphysical debates substantial? These are the questions which characterize metametaphysics. This book, the first systematic student introduction dedicated to metametaphysics, discusses the nature of metaphysics - its methodology, epistemology, ontology and our access to metaphysical knowledge. It provides students with a firm grounding in the basics of metametaphysics, covering a broad range of topics in metaon…Read more
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The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy: Sellars, Mcdowell, BrandomRoutledge. 2012.In this volume, Maher contextualizes the work of a group of contemporary analytic philosophers—The Pittsburgh School—whose work is characterized by an interest in the history of philosophy and a commitment to normative functionalism, or the insight that to identify something as a manifestation of conceptual capacities is to place it in a space of norms. Wilfrid Sellars claimed that humans are distinctive because they occupy a norm-governed "space of reasons." Along with Sellars, Robert Brandom a…Read more
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Killing the straw man: Dennett and phenomenologyPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1-2): 21-43. 2007.Can phenomenology contribute to the burgeoning science of consciousness? Dennett’s reply would probably be that it very much depends upon the type of phenomenology in question. In my paper I discuss the relation between Dennett’s heterophenomenology and the type of classical philosophical phenomenology that one can find in Husserl, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty. I will in particular be looking at Dennett’s criticism of classical phenomenology. How vulnerable is it to Dennett’s criticism, and how muc…Read more
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Abusing the notion of what-it's-like-ness: A response to BlockAnalysis 71 (3): 438-443. 2011.Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After do…Read more
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Blindsight, orgasm, and representational overlapBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (2): 268-269. 1995.
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The generality of signs: The actual relevance of anti-psychologismSemiotica 2013 (194): 77-109. 2013.
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Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies: Coincidence or interactionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 17 (2): 164-185. 1956.
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Privileged accessIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 238-251. 2002.
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Panpsychism in the WestBradford. 2005.In _Panpsychism in the West_, the first comprehensive study of the subject, David Skrbina argues for the importance of panpsychism -- the theory that mind exists, in some form, in all living and nonliving things -- in consideration of the nature of consciousness and mind. Despite the recent advances in our knowledge of the brain and the increasing intricacy and sophistication of philosophical discussion, the nature of mind remains an enigma. Panpsychism, with its conception of mind as a general …Read more
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Methodological Encounters with the Phenomenal KindPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 84 (2): 307-344. 2011.Block’s well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental methodological obstacle to the empirical study of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and access consciou…Read more
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Embodied CognitionRoutledge. 2010.Embodied cognition often challenges standard cognitive science. In this outstanding introduction, Lawrence Shapiro sets out the central themes and debates surrounding embodied cognition, explaining and assessing the work of many of the key figures in the field, including George Lakoff, Alva Noë, Andy Clark, and Arthur Glenberg. Beginning with an outline of the theoretical and methodological commitments of standard cognitive science, Shapiro then examines philosophical and empirical arguments sur…Read more
Surrey, British Columbia, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Epistemology |
Semiotics |
Philosophy of Technology, Misc |