Rutgers - New Brunswick
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2005
CV
Bellingham, Washington, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics
  •  74
    This is a review article of Hud Hudson's book A Metaphysics of the Human Person. Topics covered include the problem of the many, the Partist view, and atomless gunk.
  •  43
    The Problem of Change
    Philosophy Compass 1 (1): 48-57. 2006.
    The Eleatic philosophers argued that it was impossible for anything to change, since that would require something to differ from itself. Although this line of reasoning is unpersuasive, it challenges us to provide an account of temporal predication, which is the focus of much recent work on change. This paper surveys various approaches to change and temporal predication and addresses related questions about identity, persistence, properties, time, tense, and temporal logic.
  •  31
    Time Travel, Freedom, and Incompatibilism
    Erkenntnis 1-14. forthcoming.
    This is a paper about time travel and what it teaches us about freedom. I argue that cases of time travel bring out an important difference between two ways of thinking about “the past”—either in terms of time itself, or in terms of causation. This ambiguity naturally transfers over to our talk about things like fixity, determinism, and incompatibilism. Moreover, certain cases of time travel suggest that our freedom is not constrained by the temporal past _per se_, but by our own causal historie…Read more
  •  35
    Lessons from Grandfather
    with Andrew Law
    Philosophies 7 (1): 11. 2022.
    Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would require _F_ to have not obtained. Second, if an agent’s behavi…Read more
  •  49
    The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1): 66-77. 2020.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 66-77, January 2022.
  •  76
    The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1): 66-77. 2022.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
  •  152
    Freedom, foreknowledge, and dependence
    Noûs 55 (3): 603-622. 2019.
    The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, including the nature of explanati…Read more
  •  64
    Dispositions without Teleology
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 10. 2017.
    We argue against accounting for dispositions (and of the progressive aspect) in terms of a fundamentally teleological metaphysics, and we defend our previous conditional account from some novel objections. In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll offers a novel theory of dispositions in terms of primitive directed states. Kroll is clear that his notion of directedness “outstrips talk of goals, purposes, design, and function”, and that it commits him to “primitive teleological facts”. This no…Read more
  •  40
    How things persist (review)
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2). 2003.
    Book Information How Things Persist. By K. Hawley. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2001. Pp. ix + 221. £30.50.
  •  185
    Dispositions, Conditionals, and Counterexamples
    with D. Manley
    Mind 120 (480): 1191-1227. 2011.
    In an earlier paper in these pages (2008), we explored the puzzling link between dispositions and conditionals. First, we rehearsed the standard counterexamples to the simple conditional analysis and the refined conditional analysis defended by David Lewis. Second, we attacked a tempting response to these counterexamples: what we called the ‘getting specific strategy’. Third, we presented a series of structural considerations that pose problems for many attempts to understand the link between di…Read more
  •  198
    Vagueness and the Laws of Metaphysics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (1): 66-89. 2017.
    This is a paper about the nature of metaphysical laws and their relation to the phenomenon of vagueness. Metaphysical laws are introduced as analogous to natural laws, and metaphysical indeterminism is modeled on causal indeterminacy. This kind of indeterminacy is then put to work in developing a novel theory of vagueness and a solution to the sorites paradox.
  •  128
    Lewis on Backward Causation
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 4 (3): 141-150. 2015.
    David Lewis famously defends a counterfactual theory of causation and a non-causal, similarity-based theory of counterfactuals. Lewis also famously defends the possibility of backward causation. I argue that this combination of views is untenable—given the possibility of backward causation, one ought to reject Lewis's theories of causation and counterfactuals.
  •  39
    Paradoxes of Time Travel
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.
  •  73
    Time Travel, Ability, and Arguments by Analogy
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (1): 17-23. 2017.
  •  337
    Theories of persistence
    Philosophical Studies 173 (1): 243-250. 2016.
    The debate over persistence is often cast as a disagreement between two rival theories—the perdurantist theory that objects persist through time by having different temporal parts at different times, and the endurantist theory that objects persist through time by being wholly present at different times. This way of framing the debate over persistence involves both an important insight and an important error. Unfortunately, the error is often embraced and the insight is often ignored. This paper …Read more
  •  178
    Material constitution
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.
  •  134
    Dispositions and generics
    Philosophical Perspectives 25 (1): 425-453. 2011.
  •  377
    The Paradox of the Question
    Philosophical Studies 154 (1): 149-159. 2011.
    What is the best question to ask an omniscient being? The question is intriguing; is it also paradoxical? We discuss several versions of what Ned Markosian calls the paradox of the question and suggest solutions to each of those puzzles. We then offer some practical advice about what do if you ever have the opportunity to query an omniscient being.
  •  188
    The Standard Objection to the Standard Account
    Philosophical Studies 111 (3). 2002.
    What is the relation between a clay statue andthe lump of clay from which it is made? According to the defender of the standardaccount, the statue and the lump are distinct,enduring objects that share the same spatiallocation whenever they both exist. Suchobjects also seem to share the samemicrophysical structure whenever they bothexist. This leads to the standard objection tothe standard account: if the statue and thelump of clay have the same microphysicalstructure whenever they both exist, ho…Read more
  •  172
    Teaching & learning guide for: The problem of change
    Philosophy Compass 5 (3): 283-286. 2010.
    Our world is a world of change. Children are born and grow into adults. Material possessions rust and decay with age and ultimately perish. Yet scepticism about change is as old as philosophy itself. Heraclitus, for example, argued that nothing could survive the replacement of parts, so that it is impossible to step into the same river twice. Zeno argued that motion is paradoxical, so that nothing can alter its location. Parmenides and his followers went even further, arguing that the very conce…Read more
  •  59
    Van Inwagen on Time Travel and Changing the Past
    with Hud Hudson
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5 5 41. 2010.
  •  29
    It is widely assumed that causation is an extensional relation: if c causes e and c = d, then d causes e. Similarly, if c causes e and e = f, then c causes f. Moving to the formal mode we have: The Extensionality Thesis (ET): (i) If „c causes e‟ is true and „c‟ and „d‟ co-refer, then „d causes e‟ is true; and (ii) If „c causes e‟ is true and „e‟ and „f‟ co-refer, then „c causes f‟ is true
  •  66
  •  289
    On linking dispositions and conditionals
    Mind 117 (465): 59-84. 2008.
    Analyses of dispositional ascriptions in terms of conditional statements famously confront the problems of finks and masks. We argue that conditional analyses of dispositions, even those tailored to avoid finks and masks, face five further problems. These are the problems of: (i) Achilles' heels, (ii) accidental closeness, (iii) comparatives, (iv) explaining context sensitivity, and (v) absent stimulus conditions. We conclude by offering a proposal that avoids all seven of these problems.
  •  229
    Intentional action and the unintentional fallacy
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (4): 524-534. 2011.
    Much of the recent work in action theory can be organized around a set of objections facing the Simple View and other intention-based accounts of intentional action. In this paper, I review three of the most popular objections to the Simple View and argue that all three objections commit a common fallacy. I then draw some more general conclusions about the relationship between intentional action and moral responsibility
  •  206
    A gradable approach to dispositions
    Philosophical Quarterly 57 (226). 2007.
    Previous theories of the relationship between dispositions and conditionals are unable to account for the fact that dispositions come in degrees. We propose a fix for this problem that has the added benefit of avoiding the classic problems of finks and masks.