• Recognition, the other and tragic self-actualization
    Theory, Culture and Society 15 (1): 359-375. 2009.
  •  5
    This work considers the question of the personhood of God in Hegel. The first part examines Hegel's critique of Kant, focusing on and replying to Kant's attack on the theological proofs. The second part then explores the issue of divine personhood.
  •  99
    Hegel’s Concept of The True Infinite
    The Owl of Minerva 42 (1/2): 89-122. 2010.
    According to Hegel, the true infinite is the fundamental concept of philosophy. Yet despite this fact, there is absence of consensus concerning its meaning and significance. The true infinite challenges the currently dominant non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, as it challenged the dominance of the Kantian framework in its own day, specifically Kant’s attack on theology and his treatment of theology as a postulate of moralit y. Kant admits that the God-postulate has only subjective necess…Read more
  •  96
    Overcoming the Kantian Frame: Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God
    The Owl of Minerva 45 (1/2): 85-100. 2013.
    This paper has three sections. 1) For Hegel, the true infinite is the fundamental concept of philosophy. The true infinite challenges current non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, as it challenged Kant’s restriction of cognition to finitude and attack on metaphysics. The consciousness of limit implies a transcendence of limit, and an infinite opposed to the finite shows itself to be finite. 2) Hegel accepts Kant’s approach to the God-question through practical reason, but rejects Kant’s pos…Read more
  •  116
    Hegel’s Concept of The True Infinite
    The Owl of Minerva 42 (1-2): 89-122. 2010.
    According to Hegel, the true infinite is the fundamental concept of philosophy. Yet despite this fact, there is absence of consensus concerning its meaning and significance. The true infinite challenges the currently dominant non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, as it challenged the dominance of the Kantian framework in its own day, specifically Kant’s attack on theology and his treatment of theology as a postulate of moralit y. Kant admits that the God-postulate has only subjective necess…Read more
  •  66
    Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics
  •  12
    Affect, desire and interpretation
    Philosophical Studies 180 (9): 2871-2893. 2023.
    Are interpersonal comparisons of desire possible? Can we give an account of how facts about desires are grounded that underpins such comparisons? This paper supposes the answer to the first question is yes, and provides an account of the nature of desire that explains how this is so. The account is a modification of the interpretationist metaphysics of representation that the author has recently been developing. The modification is to allow phenomenological affective valence into the “base facts…Read more
  •  13
    Freedom as Correlation
    Proceedings of the Hegel Society of America 20 155-179. 2013.
  •  19
    The Inseparability of Love and Anguish
    Proceedings of the Hegel Society of America 21 133-156. 2013.
  •  5
    Love, Recognition, Spirit: Hegel's Philosophy of Religion
    In Stephen Houlgate & Michael Baur (eds.), A Companion to Hegel, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel on Love: The Early Theological Writings Recognition and Spirit: Hegel's Appropriation and Critique of Fichte Hegel's Philosophical Theology: Love, Reconciliation, True Infinity.
  •  1
    Reference
    In Ernie Lepore & Kirk Ludwig (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Donald Davidson, Wiley. 2013.
    We review the role of reference within Davidson's T‐theoretic account of language and examine his contention that reference is inscrutable. More generally, we look at the explanatory role of reference in the context of Davidson's philosophy: whether there are explanations that directly appeal to reference, and whether there are explanations that appeal to beliefs about reference.
  •  5
    Lewis on Reference and Eligibility
    In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.
    This chapter outlines David Lewis's favored foundational account of linguistic representation, and outlines and briefly evaluates variations and modifications. It gives an opinionated exegesis of Lewis's work on the foundations of reference: his interpretationism. The author looks at the way that the metaphysical distinction between natural and non‐natural properties came to play a central role in his thinking about language. Lewis's own deployment of this notion has implausible commitments. The…Read more
  •  493
    Consequences of Calibration
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 14. forthcoming.
    Drawing on a passage from Ramsey's Truth and Probability, we formulate a simple, plausible constraint on evaluating the accuracy of credences: the Calibration Test. We show that any additive, continuous accuracy measure that passes the Calibration Test will be strictly proper. Strictly proper accuracy measures are known to support the touchstone results of accuracy-first epistemology, for example vindications of probabilism and conditionalization. We show that our use of Calibration is an improv…Read more
  •  573
    Affect, desire and interpretation
    Philosophical Studies. forthcoming.
    Are interpersonal comparisons of desire possible? Can we give an account of how facts about desires are grounded, that underpins such comparisons? This paper supposes the answer to the first question is yes, and provides an account of the nature of desire that explains how this is so. The account is a modification of the interpretationist metaphysics of representation that the author has recently been developing. The modification is to allow phenomenological affective valence into the “base fac…Read more
  •  8
    There is No We
    In Violetta L. Waibel (ed.), Fichte Und Sartre Über Freiheit: Das Ich Und der Andere, De Gruyter. pp. 163-186. 2015.
  •  3
    Ricoeur on Recognition (review)
    European Journal of Philosophy 16 (3): 467-473. 2008.
  •  420
    Why should we be means-end rational? Why care whether someone’s mental states exhibit certain formal patterns, like the ones formalized in causal decision theory? This paper establishes a dominance argument for these constraints in a finite setting. If you violate the norms of causal decision theory, then your desires will be aptness dominated. That is, there will be some alternative set of desires that you could have had, which would be more apt (closer to the actual values fixed by your sensib…Read more
  • Accuracy, logic, and degree of belief
    In Colin R. Caret & Ole T. Hjortland (eds.), Foundations of Logical Consequence, Oxford University Press. 2015.
  •  577
    Radical parochialism about reference
    Noûs 57 (3): 600-617. 2023.
    We can use radically different reference‐schemes to generate the same truth‐conditions for the sentences of a language. In this paper, we do three things. (1) Distinguish two arguments that deploy this observation to derive different conclusions. The first argues that reference is radically indeterminate: there is no fact of the matter what ordinary terms refer to. This threat is taken seriously and most contemporary metasemantic theories come with resources intended to rebut it. The second argu…Read more
  •  48
    Indeterminacy and Triviality
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (4): 727-742. 2022.
    Suppose you’re certain that a claim—say, ‘Frida is tall’—does not have a determinate truth value. What attitude should you take towards it? This is the question of the cognitive role of indeterminacy. This paper presents a puzzle for theories of cognitive role. Many of these theories vindicate a seemingly plausible principle: if you are fully certain that A, you are rationally required to be fully certain that A is determinate. Call this principle ‘Certainty’. We show that Certainty, in combinat…Read more
  •  36
    Reply to Critics
    Analysis 81 (3): 536-548. 2021.
  •  36
  •  606
    Publicity and Common Commitment to Believe
    Erkenntnis 88 (3): 1059-1080. 2021.
    Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so for…Read more
  •  525
    The Cognitive Role of Fictionality
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 2019.
    The question of the cognitive role of fictionality is this: what is the correct cognitive attitude to take to p, when it is fictional that p? We began by considering one answer to this question, implicit in the work of Kendall Walton, that the correct response to a fictional proposition is to imagine that proposition. However, this approach is silent in cases of fictional incompleteness, where neither p nor its negation are fictional. We argue that that Waltonians should embrace a pluralistic ac…Read more
  •  226
    Response to Eklund
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 6. 2011.
    This chapter defends the account of metaphysical indeterminacy of Barnes and Williams against Eklund's objections.
  •  65
    The Metaphysics of Representation
    Oxford University Press. 2019.
    How do thought and language manage to be 'about' aspects of the world? J. Robert G. Williams investigates how representation arises out of a fundamentally non-representational world, showing the explanatory relations between the representational properties of language, of thought, and of perception and intention.
  •  431
    Commitment Problems in the naive theory of belief
    In Dirk Kindermann, Peter van Elswyk, Andy Egan & Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini (eds.), Unstructured Content, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  1161
    Indeterminacy and Triviality
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Suppose that you're certain that a certain sentence, e.g. "Frida is tall", lacks a determinate truth value. What cognitive attitude should you take towards it—reject it, suspend judgment, or what else? We show that, by adopting a seemingly plausible principle connecting credence in A and Determinately A, we can prove a very implausible answer to this question: i.e., all indeterminate claims should be assigned credence zero. The result is striking similar to so-called triviality results in the li…Read more
  •  436
    Counterfactual Triviality: A Lewis-Impossibility Argument for Counterfactuals
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (3): 648-670. 2012.
    I formulate a counterfactual version of the notorious 'Ramsey Test'. Whereas the Ramsey Test for indicative conditionals links credence in indicatives to conditional credences, the counterfactual version links credence in counterfactuals to expected conditional chance. I outline two forms: a Ramsey Identity on which the probability of the conditional should be identical to the corresponding conditional probabihty/expectation of chance; and a Ramsey Bound on which credence in the conditional shou…Read more