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McTaggart and Oakeley on the Reality of TimeIn Nina Emery (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Time, Routledge. forthcoming.J. M. E. McTaggart’s (1866-1925) argument for the unreality of time, first published in 1908, set the decisive framework for discussions about time in 20th-century analytic philosophy. This chapter provides an outline of the argument and situates it within the wider context of McTaggart’s philosophical system. It then provides an overview of a critique of McTaggart’s philosophical views on time by Hilda Oakeley (1867-1950). Oakeley was McTaggart’s contemporary and her critiques—while firmly base…Read more
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13Translators' PrefaceBergsoniana 3 (1). 2023.Translators' Preface to three texts on Henri Bergson by Jan Patočka: "Review of 'Bergson' by Vladimir Jankélévitch"; "Preface to Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion"; "Bergson" (encyclopedia entry)
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C. D. Broad on Precognitions and John William DunneJournal of the History of Philosophy. forthcoming.C. D. Broad developed three different accounts of time over the course of his career. Emily Thomas has recently argued that the shift from the first to the second of these was motivated by his engagement with the philosophy of Samuel Alexander. In this paper, I argue that the shift from the second to the third was instigated by Broad’s engagement with precognitive dreams and with the thought of John William Dunne. Furthermore, I argue that fully appreciating Broad’s interest in psychic research …Read more
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22This book connects the philosophy of Henri Bergson to contemporary debates in metaphysics and analytic philosophy of religion. More specifically, the book demonstrates how Bergson’s philosophy of time can respond to the problem of foreknowledge and free will. The question of how humans can be free if God knows everything has been a perennial issue of debate in analytic philosophy of religion. The solution to this problem relies heavily on what one thinks about time. The problem of time is centra…Read more
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28Stebbing and Eddington in the Shadow of BergsonHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (1): 59-84. 2023.In this paper, we argue that the French philosopher Henri Bergson was a hidden interlocutor in Susan Stebbing’s critique of Arthur Eddington in her Philosophy and the Physicists. First, we outline Stebbing’s critique of Eddington’s philosophical- physical writings with a particular emphasis on her case against Eddington’s account of the passage of time. Second, we provide evidence that Eddington’s philosophy is, at its core, Bergsonian and make the case that Eddington was directly influenced by …Read more
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16Taking time seriously: the Bergsonism of Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May SinclairBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (2): 331-354. 2022.This paper explores the influence of Henri Bergson’s (1859–1941) philosophy of time on three early twentieth-century British philosophers: Karin Costelloe-Stephen (1889–1953), Hilda Oakeley (1867–1950), and May Sinclair (1863–1946). I demonstrate that three central claims of Bergson’s account of temporal experience (novelty, memory, and indivisibility) were creatively incorporated into their accounts of time. All these philosophers place time at the centre of their philosophical systems, so this…Read more
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49A Bergsonian response to McTaggart's paradoxIn Yaron Wolf & Mark Sinclair (eds.), Bergsonian Mind. pp. 417-31. 2021.This paper provides a Bergsonian response to J.M.E. McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. McTaggart’s argument has been used as the primary framework for analytic discussions about time for over a hundred years. McTaggart argued that all events in time can be categorised in two ways: either using the A-series (whereby all events are ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future’) or the B-series (whereby two events are linked by the relation of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’). He argued that the A-series is co…Read more
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10Revealing the counterfactuals: molinism, stubbornness, and deceptionInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 92 (1): 31-48. 2021.This paper argues that the possibility of revealing counterfactuals of creaturely freedom to agents in possible worlds forming part of God’s natural knowledge poses a new problem for Molinism. This problem best comes to light when considering the phenomenon of stubbornness, i.e., the conscious refusal of fulfilling the providential plan revealed to and intended for us by another agent. The reason why this problem has gone unnoticed is that the usual instances of prophecy dealt with by Molinists …Read more
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6Introduction. Reassessing BergsonBergsoniana 1 (1). 2021.Introduction to the first special issue of Bergsoniana, a new journal in Bergson studies.
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10Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism About TimeTheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 5 (1). 2021.This paper argues that idealism can offer a new solution to the problem of relating the “static” presence of things to eternity and the “dynamic” passage of reality in the temporal realm. I first offer a presentation of this problem using the dispute between Aquinas and Scotus, then describe “ontological idealism about time,” as a smaller–scale idealism, and show how it resolves the original problem. I conclude by demonstrating that this view is consonant with the recent emphasis on the ontologi…Read more
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9God and Time: A Neo-Bergsonian PerspectiveDissertation, University of Cambridge. 2020.The thesis uses key insights from the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) to propose a new model of God’s relation to time. Chapter 1 is an introduction to Bergson’s philosophy against the background of Russell’s “The Philosophy of Bergson.” It provides an exposition of two key themes from Bergson central to my argument: the relation between time and space (Chapters 2-4) and the relation between free will and determinism (Chapter 5). Chapter 2 has a twofold task. First, it provides a Bergson…Read more
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35Fluctuating maximal GodInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 88 (3): 231-47. 2020.This paper explores a variety of perfect being theism that combines Yujin Nagasawa’s maximal God thesis with the view that God is not atemporal. We argue that the original maximal God thesis still implicitly relies on a “static” view of divine perfections. Instead, following the recent re-evaluation of divine immutability by analytic philosophers, we propose that thinking of divine great-making properties as fluctuating but nevertheless remaining maximal either for every time t or across all tim…Read more
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182Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal DurationEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (3): 197-224. 2019.The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that adjusting Stump and Kretzmann’s “atemporal duration” with la durée, a key concept in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, can respond to the most significant objections aimed at Stump and Kretzmann’s re-interpretation of Boethian eternity. This paper deals with three of these objections: the incoherence of the notion of “atemporal duration,” the impossibility of this duration being time-like, and the problems involved in conceiving it as being related to …Read more
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9Aquinas and Kripke on the Genealogy of Essential PropertiesHeythrop Journal 62 (6): 1025-1037. 2021.The aim of this article is to reassess the similarity between Kripke’s metaphysics and Aquinas’ thought on truth, a similarity affirmed in Schultz-Aldrich’s Heythrop Journal article from 2009 and denied by Klima and Kerr in their analysis of Kripkean and Thomist accounts of essence. My claim is that this similarity has been insufficiently understood and its misunderstanding has closed off ways by means of which Aquinas’ thought can provide Kripkean epistemology with a component that it lacks.
Cambridge University
PhD, 2020
St Andrews, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
3 more
Metaphilosophy |
Time |
Causation |
Modality |
Philosophy of Religion |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
19th Century Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
History of Western Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |