•  11
    Fictional Resistance and Real Feelings
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 11 (2): 106-113. 2022.
    This paper outlines a solution to the puzzle of imaginative resistance that makes—and if successful helps to vindicate—two assumptions. The solution first assumes a relationship between moral judgements and affective states of the subject. It also assumes the correctness of accounts of imaginative engagement with fiction—like Kendall Walton’s account—that treat engagement with fiction as prop-based make-believe in which works of fiction, but also appreciators of those works, figure as props. The…Read more
  •  21
    Fictional Characters and Characterisations
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (2): 348-367. 2023.
    Realists about fictional characters posit a certain theoretical role and a candidate to fill this role. I will delineate the role realists take fictional characters like Emma Woodhouse to fill, and I will argue that it is better filled by what I will call ‘characterisations’. In explaining what I mean by ‘characterisations’, I will show that the existence of these entities is comparatively uncontroversial. Realists should acknowledge their existence, but doing so, I will argue, obviates the need…Read more
  •  51
    Answering machine messages allegedly refute Kaplan's ‘classical account’ of the semantics of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. The classical account doesn’t allow that a token of ‘I am not here now’ can be true; but these words in an answering machine message can communicate something true. In this paper I argue that the true content communicated by an answering machine message is extra-semantic content conveyed via the mechanism of ‘externally-oriented make-believe’. An answering machine message is associ…Read more
  •  161
    How the Dead Live
    Philosophia 39 (1): 83-103. 2011.
    This paper maintains (following Yougrau 1987; 2000 and Hinchliff 1996) that the dead and other former existents count as examples of non-existent objects. If the dead number among the things there are, a further question arises: what is it to be dead—how should the state of being dead be characterised? It is argued that this state should be characterised negatively: the dead are not persons, philosophers etc. They lack any of the (intrinsic) qualities they had while they lived. The only facts in…Read more
  •  50
    Truth As, At Most, One
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1): 135-147. 2012.
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 20, Issue 1, Page 135-147, February 2012
  •  90
    BOOK REVIEW The Objects of Thought. Tim Crane. (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 64 (256): 517-520. 2014.
  •  182
    Yes: Bare Particulars!
    Philosophical Studies 172 (5): 1355-1370. 2015.
    What is the Bare Particular Theory? Is it committed, like the Bundle Theory, to a constituent ontology: according to which a substance’s qualities—and according to the Bare Particular Theory, its substratum also—are proper parts of the substance? I argue that Bare Particularists need not, should not, and—if a recent objection to ‘the Bare Particular Theory’ succeeds—cannot endorse a constituent ontology. There is nothing, I show, in the motivations for Bare Particularism or the principles that d…Read more