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Being at home : human beings and human bodiesIn Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford handbook of continental philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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7Radical self-silencing is a particular variety of speech act disablement where the subject silences themselves, whether knowingly or not, because of their own faults or deficiencies. The paper starts with some concrete cases and preparatory comments to help orient and motivate the investigation. It then offers a summary analysis, drawing on a small number of basic concepts to identify its five individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions and discriminating their two basic forms, ‘int…Read more
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6Incense and Insensibility: Austin on the ‘Non‐Seriousness’ of PoetryIn Severin Schroeder (ed.), Philosophy of Literature, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.
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3Wittgenstein on “I” and the SelfIn Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein, Wiley-blackwell. 2017.Consensus identifies an underlying continuity to Wittgenstein's treatment of the self and 'I', despite certain obvious surface variations and revisions. Almost all Wittgenstein's arguments and observations concerning 'I' and the self in the Tractatus are arranged as attempts to explicate. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world, not a part of it. The picture that…Read more
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16Critical noticeAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (3). 1996.This Article does not have an abstract
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16Metaphysical Exile: On J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus Fictions, by Robert PippinMind 133 (530): 578-587. 2022.
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4Balance in The Golden Bowl: Attuning Philosophy and Literary CriticismIn Sanjit Chakraborty & James Ferguson Conant (eds.), Engaging Putnam, De Gruyter. pp. 309-330. 2022.This paper argues that Henry James’ treatment of balancing in The Golden Bowl—to which Putnam insightfully draws attention—calls for the attunement of philosophy and literary criticism. The process may undermine Putnam’s own reading of the novel, but it also finds new reasons to endorse what his reading was meant to deliver: the confidence that philosophy and thoughtful appreciation of literature have much to contribute to each other, and the conviction that morality can incorporate (Kantian) se…Read more
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16Pledging my timeIn C. Sandis & G. Browning (eds.), Dylan at 80, Imprint Academic. forthcoming.Prompted by Bob Dylan's song of this title: an essay on the philosophical issues raised by the idea of pledging one's time, and doing so in and by performing a song.
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21Naturalist Semantics and the Appeal to StructureSouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 57-74. 2010.We need not accommodate facts about meaning if Quine is right about the indeterminacy of subsentential expressions; there can be no such facts to accommodate. Evans argued that Quine's approach overlooks the ways speakers use predication to endow their use of subsentential expressions with the necessary determinacy. This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate in relation to current arguments about naturalism and shows how Evans's response depends on a basic claim that turns out to be f…Read more
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24Naturalist Semantics and the Appeal to StructureSouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (1): 57-74. 2006.We need not accommodate facts about meaning if Quine is right about the indeterminacy of subsentential expressions; there can be no such facts to accommodate. Evans argued that Quine’s approach overlooks the ways speakers use predication to endow their use of subsentential expressions with the necessary determinacy. This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate in relation to current arguments about naturalism and shows how Evans’s response depends on a basic claim that turns out to be f…Read more
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2How wrong can one be?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1): 387-394. 1996.Max de Gaynesford; How Wrong Can One Be?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 387–394, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.
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7The Rift In The Lute: Attuning Poetry and PhilosophyOxford University Press. 2017.What is it for poetry to be serious and to be taken seriously? What is it to be open to poetry, exposed to its force, attuned to what it says and alive to what it does? These are important questions that call equally on poetry and philosophy. But poetry and philosophy, notoriously, have an ancient quarrel. Maximilian de Gaynesford sets out to understand and convert their mutual antipathy into something mutually enhancing, so that we can begin to answer these and other questions. The key to attun…Read more
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110John McDowell on experience: Open to the sceptic?Metaphilosophy 29 (1-2): 20-34. 1998.The aim of this paper is to show that John McDowell’s approach to perception in terms of “openness”remains problematically vulnerable to the threat of scepticism. The leading thought of the openness view is that objects, events and others in the world, and no substitute, just are what is disclosed in perceptual experience. An account which aims to defend this thought must show, therefore, that the content of perceptual experience does not “all short” of its objects. We shall describe how McDowel…Read more
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42Is I Guaranteed to Refer?Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (2): 109-126. 2003.One claim about I, regularly made and almost universally endorsed, is that uses of the term are logically guaranteed to refer successfully (if they refer at all). The claim is only rarely formulated perspicuously or argued for. Such obscurity helps disguise the fact that those who profess to advance the claim actually turn out to support not a logical guarantee at all but merely high security through fortunate coincidence. This is not surprising. For we have no good reason to accept the claim – …Read more
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93Incense and Insensibility: Austin on the ‘Non‐Seriousness’ of PoetryRatio 22 (4): 464-485. 2009.What is at stake when J. L. Austin calls poetry ‘non‐serious’, and sidelines it in his speech act theory? (I). Standard explanations polarize sharply along party lines: poets (e.g. Geoffrey Hill) and critics (e.g. Christopher Ricks) are incensed, while philosophers (e.g. P. F. Strawson; John Searle) deny cause (II). Neither line is consistent with Austin's remarks, whose allusions to Plato, Aristotle and Frege are insufficiently noted (III). What Austin thinks is at stake is confusion, which he …Read more
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23Attuning film and philosophy: the space-time continuumIn Craig Fox & Britt Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Macmillan. 2023.Ordinarily, what we experience does not jump from one place or time to another—we have to pass through all the intermediate times and places. But in films, what we experience can jump in both dimensions, both separately and together. This phenomenon has been memorably described in film criticism by Rudolph Arnheim and it has been deployed philosophically by Suzanne Langer and Colin McGinn. But discussion of space-time discontinuity remains hampered by the lack of attunement between film critical…Read more
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38The mind of Pope Francis: a review article by Professor Max De Gaynesford (t86)Ampleforth Journal. forthcoming.I dispute the commonly held impression that Pope Francis is a compassionate shepherd and determined leader but that he lacks the intellectual depth of his recent predecessors.
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32Balance in the golden bowl: attuning philosophy and literary criticismIn Yemima Ben-Menahem (ed.), Hilary Putnam, Cambridge University Press. 2005.This paper argues that Henry James’ treatment of balancing in The Golden Bowl—to which Putnam insightfully draws attention—calls for the attunement of philosophy and literary criticism. The process may undermine Putnam’s own reading of the novel, but it also finds new reasons to endorse what his reading was meant to deliver: the confidence that philosophy and thoughtful appreciation of literature have much to contribute to each other, and the conviction that morality can incorporate (Kantian) se…Read more
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69Integrity Over Time: Korsgaard and the Unity CriterionThe Harvard Review of Philosophy 18 (1): 50-72. 2012.
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
History of Western Philosophy |
Value Theory |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
History of Western Philosophy |
Value Theory |