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5Does Philosophical Progress Matter?In Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.), Philosophy's Future, Wiley. 2017-04-27.I argue that philosophy has achieved no appreciable progress in making people better and wiser or solving its own central problems. This lack of progress matters, but I find hope in experimental philosophy. Although philosophical worldviews from Plato's to the present have aided comprehension of how things hang together, their only steady progress has come from adjusting to advances in science. If the power of philosophy were like the power of poetry, this would not matter. Each worldview could …Read more
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Why is that art?In Florian Cova & Sébastien Réhault (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
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Why is that art?In Réhault Sébastien & Cova Florian (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury. pp. 79-102. 2018.
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31Phenomenology and Existentialism. Ed. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum. (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 7 (2): 222-224. 1969.This anthology of classic essays focuses on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the philosophical movement to which his writings gave impetus: phenomenology. Sixty contributions from a wide variety of scholars provide an introduction to phenomenology and existentialist phenomenology. Among the contributors are Frege, Chisholm, Merleau-Ponty, Schmitt, Tillman, Gendlin, Sellars, Linsky, Dreyfus, Ryle, Solomon, Schlick, Ricoeur, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Brentano, Olafson, Camus, and de Beauvoir
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55Review of "The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method" (review)Essays in Philosophy 17 (1): 213-232. 2016.
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A Study of the Relationship Between Philosophy and LiteratureDissertation, The Claremont Graduate University. 1975.
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92Liars, poets and philosophers: The assertions of authors in philosophy and literatureBritish Journal of Aesthetics 17 (4): 335-345. 1977.
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36"Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction," by Joshua Alexander (review)Teaching Philosophy 36 (1): 88-91. 2013.
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45The logic of the goldhagen debateRes Publica 6 (2): 155-177. 2000.Since Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustattempts to show that the Holocaust is explicable and can be understood largely in terms of a single cause, “eliminationist anti-Semitism”, it is not surprising that the book has generated an international debate. What is surprising is the magnitude and emotional intensity of the debate. This article argues that the deepest flaws in it Hitler's Willing Executioners,as well as the chasm of disagreement be…Read more
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163Experimental Philosophy of ArtJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 197-208. 2011.Although experimental philosophers have been busy kindling fires under well-worn armchairs in areas of philosophy as varied as epistemology, normative ethics, theories of reference, and the free will controversy, the philosophy of art has remained largely untouched. As Denis Dutton observes: “There is precious little reference to empirical psychology in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, almost as if philosophers of art have wanted to protect their patch from incursions by psychologists.” I …Read more
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46Philosophy’s Future as a Problem-Solving DisciplineEssays in Philosophy 12 (2): 292-312. 2011.Scientists often reach provisional agreement solutions to problems central to their disciplines, whereas philosophers do not. Although philosophy has been practiced by outstanding intellects for over two thousand years, philosophers have not reached agreement, provisional or otherwise, on the solution or dissolution of any central philosophical problem by philosophical methods. What about philosophy’s future? Until about 1970, philosophers were generally optimistic. Some pinned their hopes on re…Read more
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77A modest proposal for defining a work of artBritish Journal of Aesthetics 33 (4): 313-320. 1993.
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47Weitz reconsidered: A clearer view of why theories of art failBritish Journal of Aesthetics 38 (1): 33-46. 1998.