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James and Hegel: Looking for a HomeIn Alexander Mugar Klein (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of William James, Oxford University Press. 2018.Although William James formed his philosophical views in direct reaction to the Hegelianism then dominant in American and British institutions, modern critics have tended to reject James’s criticism of G. W. F. Hegel as superficial and outdated. This is in part due to James’s energetic rhetorical style, but also because James at his most polemical tends to present his pluralistic and pragmatist empiricism as diametrically opposed to Hegel’s monistic and intellectualistic idealism, so that it is …Read more
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Radical Empiricism, British Idealism, and the Reality of RelationsIn Sarin Marchetti (ed.), The Jamesian Mind, Routledge. pp. 398-411. 2021.
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The Affective Preconditions of Inquiry: Hookway on Doubt, Sentiment, and EthicsIn Robert B. Talisse, Paniel Reyes Cárdenas & Daniel Herbert (eds.), Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition, Routledge. pp. 162-181. 2023.One of the major contributions which Christopher Hookway has made to pragmatist epistemology is a critical exploration of the role that affective dispositions play in inquiry. According to Hookway, a well-functioning rational inquirer must rely upon a set of pre-reflective and affective dispositions which are not themselves fully available to rational evaluation. Despite their pre-reflective nature, on the pragmatist account these affective dispositions provide us with judgments and evaluations …Read more
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69The "No Interest" Argument Against the Rights of NaturePhilosophers' Imprint. forthcoming.Awarding rights to rivers, forests, and other environmental entities (EEs) is a new and increasingly popular approach to environmental protection. The distinctive feature of such rights of nature (RoN) legislation is that direct duties are owed to the EEs. This paper presents a novel rebuttal of the strongest argument against RoN: the no interest argument. The crux of this argument is that because EEs are not sentient, they cannot possess the kinds of interests necessary to ground direct duties.…Read more
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281In this chapter, we compare Kant and James’ accounts of freedom. Despite both thinkers’ rejecting compatibilism for the sake of practical reason, there are two striking differences in their stances. The first concerns whether or not freedom requires the possibility of an open future. James holds that morality hinges on the real possibility that the future can be affected by our actions. Kant, on the other hand, seems to maintain that we can still be free in the crucial sense, even if none of our…Read more
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20The Role of Temperament in Philosophical Inquiry: A Pragmatic ApproachJournal of the History of Philosophy 61 (2): 297-323. 2023.Abstractabstract:In his Pragmatism lectures, William James argued that philosophers' temperaments partially determine the theories that they find satisfying, and that their influence explains persistent disagreement within the history of philosophy. Crucially, James was not only making a descriptive claim, but also a normative one: temperaments, he thought, could play a legitimate epistemic role in our philosophical inquiries. This paper aims to evaluate and defend this normative claim.There are…Read more
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20Animals: a history: edited by Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. xiv + 454, £22.99 (pb), ISBN: 978-0-199-37597-4 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (1): 209-212. 2020.Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2020, Page 209-212.
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38Kidnapping an ugly child: is William James a pragmaticist?British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (1): 154-175. 2018.Since the term ‘pragmatism’ was first coined, there have been debates about who is or is not a ‘real’ pragmatist, and what that might mean. The division most often drawn in contemporary pragmatist scholarship is between William James and Charles Peirce. Peirce is said to present a version of pragmatism which is scientific, logical and objective about truth, whereas James presents a version which is nominalistic, subjectivistic and leads to relativism. The first person to set out this division wa…Read more
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36Absolutism, Relativism and Anarchy: Alain Locke and William James on Value PluralismTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 53 (3): 400. 2017.It would not be an exaggeration to say that pluralism was central to the philosophical thought of William James. Repeatedly, James claimed that the difference between monism and pluralism was the "most pregnant" in philosophy.1 Radical empiricism, James's distinctive metaphysical vision, was first introduced as the view that pluralism was a plausible hypothesis about the permanent state of the world, and this pluralism continued to be a central feature of his philosophy in later years.2The asser…Read more
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98Practical grounds for belief: Kant and James on religionEuropean Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 1269-1282. 2018.Both Kant and James claim to limit the role of knowledge in order to make room for faith. In this paper, we argue that despite some similarities, their attempts to do this come apart. Our main claim is that, although both Kant and James justify our adopting religious beliefs on practical grounds, James believes that we can—and should—subsequently assess such beliefs on the basis of evidence. We offer our own account of this evidence and discuss what this difference means for their accounts of re…Read more
University of Sheffield
PhD, 2017
London, London, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
19th Century American Philosophy |
19th Century Philosophy |
Environmental Ethics |
Normative Ethics |