•  17
    Self-Awareness and The Elusive Subject
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    The existence of a self seems both mysterious and inevitable. On the one hand, philosophers from the Buddha to Sartre doubt its existence. As Hume writes, when we introspect we find thoughts, feelings, and conscious states, but nothing that has them. The subject of experience is elusive, but its existence seems certain. Descartes’ cogito is beyond doubt and the thought that “I am thinking” involves an undeniable form of self-awareness. Self-Awareness and the Elusive Subject develops and defends …Read more
  •  5
    The God Dialogues: A Philosophical Journey
    Oxford University Press USA. 2010.
    The God Dialogues is an intriguing and extensive philosophical debate about the existence of God. Engaging and accessible, it covers all the main arguments for and against God's existence, from traditional philosophical "proofs" to arguments that involve the latest developments in biology and physics. Three main characters represent the principal views: Theodore Logan, the theist; Eva Lucien, the atheist; and Gene Sesquois, the agnostic. Their debate takes place during a post-college cross-count…Read more
  •  84
    How could physicalism be true of a world in which there are no fundamental physical phenomena? A familiar answer, due to Barbara Gail Montero and others, is that physicalism could be true of such a world if that world does not contain an infinite descent of mentality. Christopher Devlin Brown has produced a counterexample to that solution. We show how to modify the solution to accommodate Brown’s example: physicalism could be true of a world without fundamental physical phenomena if that world d…Read more
  •  14
    Ideal for courses in consciousness and the philosophy of mind, Consciousness and The Mind-Body Problem: A Reader presents thirty-three classic and contemporary readings, organized into five sections that cover the major issues in this debate: the challenge for physicalism, physicalist responses, alternative responses, the significance of ignorance, and mental causation. Edited by Torin Alter and Robert J. Howell, the volume features work from such leading figures as Karen Bennett, Ned Block, Dav…Read more
  •  26
    Physicalism, supervenience, and monism
    Synthese 200 (6): 1-19. 2022.
    Physicalism is standardly construed as a form of monism, on which all concrete phenomena fall under one fundamental type. It is natural to think that monism, and therefore physicalism, is committed to a supervenience claim. Monism is true only if all phenomena supervene on a certain fundamental type of phenomena. Physicalism, as a form of monism, specifies that these fundamental phenomena are physical. But some argue that physicalism might be true even if the world is disorderly, i.e., not order…Read more
  •  28
    Reflecting on Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness
    ProtoSociology 36 157-185. 2019.
    Most philosophers in the phenomenological tradition hold that in addition to the explicit self-consciousness we might get in reflection, there is also a pre-reflective self-consciousness. Despite its popularity, it can be a little difficult to get a grasp on this notion. It can seem impossibly thin—such that it really amounts to little more than a restatement of the notion of consciousness—or problematically robust—such that it seems to conflict with the apparent transparency of consciousness. T…Read more
  •  13
    Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 733-736. 2001.
  •  38
    A Dialogue on Consciousness introduces readers to the debate about consciousness and physicalism, starting with its origins in Descartes, through a lively and entertaining dialogue between unemployed graduate students, who, secretly living in a university library, discuss major theories and quote passages from classic and contemporary texts in search of an answer.
  •  103
    The Subject of Experience
    Philosophical Review 128 (1): 134-138. 2019.
  •  48
    SummaryThe paper discusses major issues concerning the A104‐10 transcendental‐object theory. For that theory, our de re knowledge becomes related to its object just because our understanding thinks a certain object to stand related to the intuition via which we know. Employing an apparatus of intensional logic, I argue that this thought of an object is to be understood as a certain sort of intuition‐related, de dicto thought. Then I explore how, via such a de dicto thought, we can nevertheless a…Read more
  •  66
    Seeing as
    Synthese 23 (4). 1972.
  •  14
    Deferring to moral experts
    The Philosophers' Magazine 61 37-41. 2013.
  •  12
    Immunity to Error and Subjectivity
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (4): 581-604. 2007.
    Since Sydney Shoemaker published his seminal article ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentification’ has received much attention. It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James. The precise significance of IEM is often unspecified in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether itconstitut…Read more
  •  26
    Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 733-736. 2001.
    Keller develops a new account of transcendental apperception. He urges, with Kant, that apperception imposes categorial constraints on our experience of the world. He also considers Kant’s arguments for substance, causality, and interaction; the Paralogisms’ discussion of the I think; and Kantian idealism.
  •  9
    Kant’s Transcendental Deduction: An Analysis of Main Themes in His Critical Philosophy
    with R. C. Howell and Robert A. Howell
    Springer Verlag. 1992.
    The argument of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the Critique of Pure Reason is the deepest and most far-reaching in philosophy. In his new book, Robert Howell interprets main themes of the Deduction using ideas from contemporary philosophy and intensional logic, thereby providing a keener grasp of Kant's many subtleties than has hitherto been available. No other work pursues Kant's argument through every twist and turn with the careful, logically detailed attention maintained h…Read more
  •  176
    Kant and Kantian Themes in Recent Analytic Philosophy
    Metaphilosophy 44 (1-2): 42-47. 2013.
    This article notes six advances in recent analytic Kant research: (1) Strawson's interpretation, which, together with work by Bennett, Sellars, and others, brought renewed attention to Kant through its account of space, time, objects, and the Transcendental Deduction and its sharp criticisms of Kant on causality and idealism; (2) the subsequent investigations of Kantian topics ranging from cognitive science and philosophy of science to mathematics; (3) the detailed work, by a number of scholars,…Read more
  •  33
  •  92
    I examine central points in the 1787 deduction, Including the question of how kant can demonstrate his crucial claim that if I know via intuition "i", Then any element of "i"'s manifold is such that I am or can become conscious that that element is mine. I also consider the deduction's overall strategy, Kant's theory of synthesis and of our use of 'i', And some recent interpretations. See, Further, My 1981 "dialectica" transcendental-Object paper
  •  27
    Deduction Difficulties
    Kantian Review 23 (1): 111-121. 2018.
    I argue, contrary to Dennis Schulting inKant’s Radical Subjectivism, that the main reasoning of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is progressive, not regressive. Schulting is right, however, to emphasize that the deduction takes the object cognized to be constituted in an idealism-entailing way. But his reasoning has gaps and bypasses Kant’s most explicit deduction argument, independent of the Transcendental Aesthetic, for idealism. Finally, Schulting’s claim that Kantian discurs…Read more
  •  352
    The Two‐Dimensionalist Reductio
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (3): 348-358. 2008.
    In recent years two‐dimensional semantics has become one of the most serious alternatives to Millianism for the proper interpretation of modal discourse. It has origins in the works of a diverse group of philosophers, and it has proven popular as an interpretation of both language and thought. It has probably received most of its attention, however, because of its use by David Chalmers in his arguments against materialism. It is this more metaphysical application of two‐dimensionalism that is th…Read more