•  964
    The Epistemology of Anger in Argumentation
    Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 5 (2): 229-254. 2018.
    While anger can derail argumentation, it can also help arguers and audiences to reason together in argumentation. Anger can provide information about premises, biases, goals, discussants, and depth of disagreement that people might otherwise fail to recognize or prematurely dismiss. Anger can also enhance the salience of certain premises and underscore the importance of related inferences. For these reasons, we claim that anger can serve as an epistemic resource in argumentation.
  •  101
    Feminist critiques of science show that systematic biases strongly influence what scientific communities find salient. Features of reality relevant to women, for instance, may be under-appreciated or disregarded because of bias. Many feminist analyses of values in science identify problems with salience and suggest better epistemologies. But overlooked in such analyses are important discussions about intellectual virtues and the role they play in determining salience. Intellectual virtues influe…Read more
  •  35
    In this paper, I argue that adventurous approaches to physical activity can contribute more to well-being than approaches that have been shaped by fitness ideology. To defend this claim, I draw on work in philosophy and psychology concerning internal goods and intrinsic motivation, respectively. This work shows that motivating ourselves intrinsically and cultivating the internal goods of physical activity can contribute significantly to well-being. Unfortunately, the discourse and images associa…Read more
  •  31
    The Self of Philosophy and the Self of Immunology
    Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 42 (1): 118-130. 1998.
  •  27
    Fitness, Well-Being, and Preparation for Death
    International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 9 (2): 115-140. 2016.
    In this article, I argue that we should revise our understanding of physical fitness to include preparation for challenging physically mediated life experiences—such as aging, disability, illness, reproduction, and death—as an important goal of physical activity. Such a revision is needed because the messages about fitness we encounter through “fitness ideology” can undermine the cultivation of skills and perspectives important for finding meaning, equanimity, and even happiness in light of such…Read more
  •  21
    When people argue, they are vulnerable to unwanted and costly changes in their beliefs. This vulnerability motivates the position that belief involuntarism makes argument inherently adversarial, as well as the development of alternatives to adversarial argumentation such as “invitational rhetoric”. The emphasis on involuntary belief change in such accounts, in our perspective, neglects three dimensions of arguing: the diversity of arguer intentions, audience agency, and the benefits of belief ch…Read more
  •  14
    At first glance, happiness and objectivity seem to have little in common. I claim, however, that subjective and eudaimonic happiness promotes arguer objectivity. To support my claim, I focus on connections between happiness, social intelligence, and intellectual virtue. After addressing objections concerning unhappy objective and happy unobjective arguers, I conclude that communities should value happiness in argumentative contexts and use happiness as an indicator of their capacity for objectiv…Read more
  •  11
    Robert Pinto and Laura Pinto advance a non-binary account of reason and emotion in the reasoning process and argue for a naturalistic understanding of objectivity that will allow for the evaluation of emotions as reasonable. Pinto and Pinto’s promising argument generates important and productive lines of inquiry. I suggest a few such lines of inquiry, including the idea that it may be important to support reflexivity and interpretive community with equanimity; that we should further examine the …Read more
  •  9
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Carlos Nuñes Silva, John M. Cogan, and William Wyckoff
    Ethics, Place and Environment 10 (3): 351-361. 2007.
    John A. Matthews and David T. Herbert London and New York: Routledge, 2004, xiv + 402 pp., cloth, $160.00, paper, $44.95 The development of geography during the twentieth century has been a r...
  •  6
    Surfing and the philosophy of sport
    Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 1-6. forthcoming.
    Daniel Brennan brings his research in political philosophy and his surfing experience together in this excellent and engaging contribution to philosophy of surfing and surf studies. In the course o...
  •  2
    Objectivity, Intellectual Virtue, and Community
    In Flavia Padovani, Alan Richardson & Jonathan Y. Tsou (eds.), Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives From Science and Technology Studies, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Vol. 310. Springer. pp. 173-188. 2015.
    In this paper, I argue that the objectivity of persons is best understood in terms of intellectual virtue, the telos of which is an enduring commitment to salient and accurate information about reality. On this view, an objective reasoner is one we can trust to manage her perspectives, beliefs, emotions, biases, and responses to evidence in an intellectually virtuous manner. We can be confident that she will exercise intellectual carefulness, openmindedness, fairmindedness, curiosity, and other …Read more
  •  1
    Self and Nonself
    In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Theoretical Perspectives Challenges Conclusion References Further Reading.
  • Immunology and the Indiscrete Self
    Dissertation, The University of Western Ontario (Canada). 1999.
    To date, the attempt to find necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity has not been successful. Both psychological and physical criteria have failed to capture important intuitions about what it is to be the same self over time: moreover, they yield counter-intuitive and often bizarre results. I argue that the driving force behind these counter-intuitive approaches to the self is what I call the discreteness assumption, an assumption which is generally not explicitly recognized. …Read more