•  53
    Moore and Descartes meet in a bar
    Think 11 (31): 21-26. 2012.
    Philosophers typically distinguish between a priori and a posteriori beliefs, knowledge, justification, and propositions. A belief is a priori if it is derived from reason, and it is a posteriori if it is derived from sense experience. Similarly, we would say that we know a priori that ‘a closed, n-sided figure has n interior angles’ because our knowledge is derived from reason in that we understand the concept of a closed, n-sided figure and thus know the statement is true. On the other hand, w…Read more
  •  39
    Parents concerned with what goes on when they leave their children at home under the care of someone else might wonder whether or not they should invest in video surveillance equipment. Such technology has become readily available and is relatively inexpensive, but is it morally permissible to use this sort of technology to monitor the care of one's children?
  •  5
    Les Droits de Propriete et l'environnement
    Journal des Economistes Et des Etudes Humaines 7 (2-3): 269-280. 1996.
  •  2
    Correlates of exam performance in an introductory logic course
    with Linda J. Palm
    APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy 1 (14): 2-8. 2014.
    This study examined academic and psychological correlates of exam performance in an introductory logic course. The participants were 39 students who completed Logic and Critical Thinking at a southeastern liberal arts university. Students were assigned 20 online homework sets, met for two 75-minute class sessions each week for a 15-week term, and took three exams. A general self-efficacy scale and a frustration scale were administered during the last class meeting. A significant positive correla…Read more
  • Qualia, Introspection, and Transparency
    Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder. 2002.
    A compelling position in the philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is a non-intentional property of the experience that is immediately accessible to introspection, what philosophers commonly call a quale. And yet, when one introspects in order to discover what one's experience is like, introspection reveals only what one's experience is of. If there are qualia, they seem to be transparent to introspection. The very nature of qualia thus seems to conflict with the phen…Read more
  •  33
    The Broad Perception Model and the Transparency of Qualia
    Behavior and Philosophy 39 69-81. 2011.
    The transparency of qualia to introspection has been given as reason for favoring a representationalist view of phenomenal character. Qualia realists, notably Block (1996, 2000), A.D. Smith (2008), and Kind (2003, 2008), have denied that qualia are transparent. What is clear is that the phenomenology of introspection alone cannot decide the case, but a theory of introspection could. If the qualia realist could show that our introspective access to mental properties is akin to the perceptual acce…Read more
  •  79
    Van Cleve and Putnam on Kant’s View of Secondary Qualities
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27 (1): 83-102. 2006.
    James Van Cleve provides an analysis of Kant’s view of secondary qualities in response to Hilary Putnam’s claim that Kant holds that “all qualities are secondary qualities.” Van Cleve proposes that we modify the thesis Putnam attributes to Kant in order to arrive at an explanation of both primary and secondary qualities that Kant would endorse. I argue that there is a serious flaw in Van Cleve’s characterization of Putnam’s thesis, namely that there is no significant difference between Putnam’s …Read more
  •  3
    The Transparency of Qualia and the Nature of Introspection
    Philosophical Writings 29 (2): 21-44. 2005.
    The idea that the phenomenal character of experience is determined by non-intentional properties of experience, what philosophers commonly call qualia, seems to conflict with the phenomenology of introspection. Qualia seem to be transparent, or unavailable, to introspection. This has led intentionalists to deny that the phenomenal character of experience is a non-intentional property of experience—to deny there are qualia. It has led qualia realists to deny the transparency of qualia or to quest…Read more
  •  724
    How to Teach Philosophy of Mind
    Teaching Philosophy 39 (2): 177-207. 2016.
    The most notable contributions to contemporary philosophy of mind have been written by philosophers of mind for philosophers of mind. Without a good understanding of the historical framework, the technical terminology, the philosophical methodology, and the nature of the philosophical problems themselves, not only do undergraduate students face a difficult challenge when taking a first course in philosophy of mind, but instructors lacking specialized knowledge in this field might be put off from…Read more
  •  16
    Representationalism, Inversion and Color Constancy
    Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 21 (1): 1-15. 2007.
    Sydney Shoemaker has gone to great lengths to defend a repre-sentationalist view of phenomenal character, and yet he describes this view as breaking with standard representationalism in two ways. First, he thinks his representationalist position is consis- tent with the possibility of spectrum inversion, and second, he thinks there are qualia. Thus, we can think of his position in the qualia debate as moderate representationalism (or, equally, moderate qualia realism) by taking up some middle gr…Read more