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13European and American PhilosophersIn Robert L. Arrington (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophers, Blackwell. 2017.Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categ…Read more
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16Philosophy Through MemesIn Lee C. McIntyre, Nancy Arden McHugh & Ian Olasov (eds.), A companion to public philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2022.A paradigm of a meme, in its contemporary sense, is an image macro – an image copied by users, who customize it by adding their own text according to implicitly prescribed norms. The native medium of philosophy is language, generally in the form of either discursive text or Socratic discussion. This chapter suggests there are two features of human existence that stand to meme‐making in something of the same relation as spontaneous dance does to choreography. These features are bricolage and owne…Read more
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25A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!Tell It Slant Press. 2022.A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is an entirely original kind of work. It takes the form of commentaries on memes made with the image of Batman slapping Robin. The commentaries are written as if they were not authored by the same person who made the memes, allowing the author to consider himself and his work from the outside. The book defies genre by mixing discussions of philosophy, psychoanalysis, Judaism, language, and representation with self-writing and autot…Read more
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42The Historicity of Artifacts: Use and Counter-UseMetaphysics 5 (1): 1-13. 2022.Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘queer use,’ I present and extend a neo-Aristotelian theory of artifacts to capture what I call ‘counter-use.’ The theory of artifacts is based on the idea that what they are, how they come to be, and what their functions are cannot be understood independently from each other. They come to exist when a maker imposes the concept of their substantial kind onto some matter by working on the matter to make an artifact of that kind out of it. The extensions to this …Read more
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270Mass ProductionIn Javier Cumpa & Bill Brewer (eds.), The Nature of Ordinary Objects, Cambridge University Press. pp. 198-222. 2018.I argue that mass produced artifacts are ontologically distinctive. If we think of the making of an artifact as the imposition of a creative intention on to some matter, usually through intentional manipulation of the matter, then in the case of mass production, one could say that there is not enough mind to go around! Batches of mass produced objects will have a distinctive essence, lying in the creative act by which they are made, but within a batch, the objects will be distinct from each othe…Read more
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502The Use of Sets (and Other Extensional Entities) in the Analysis of Hylomorphically Complex ObjectsMetaphysics 1 (1): 97-109. 2018.Hylomorphically complex objects are things that change their parts or matter or that might have, or have had, different parts or matter. Often ontologists analyze such objects in terms of sets (or functions, understood set-theoretically) or other extensional entities such as mereological fusions or quantities of matter. I urge two reasons for being wary of any such analyses. First, being extensional, such things as sets are ill-suited to capture the characteristic modal and temporal flexibility …Read more
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155The Anonymity of a Murmur: Internet MemesBritish Journal of Aesthetics 58 (3): 303-318. 2018.Memes, of the kind found often on the internet, are an increasingly significant medium of expressive activity. I develop a theory of their ontological nature and, in parallel, an analysis of the concept meme. On my view, memes are abstract artifacts made out of norms for production of instances. The norms say things like ‘use a certain image; add text of a certain kind; the text should be delivered in two chunks, one at the top of the image, one at the bottom, etc.’ Instances of these memes are …Read more
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67Critical Notice: Thomas Sattig’s The Double Lives of Objects: An Essay in the Metaphysics of the ordinary world, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (1): 142-157. 2018.This critical notice describes some of Thomas Sattig’s book The Double Lives of Objects: An Essay in the Metaphysics of the Ordinary World and raises several critical issues about it.
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The Relations Between Logic and ThoughtDissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 1996.Two traditional opinions about the relations between logic and thought are presented: first, that logic and thought have nothing to do with each other; second, that logic is the empirical science of thought. This second view is known as psychologism. I characterize a third view, which I call psycho--logicism, according to which logic is not dependent on thought, as in psychologism, but in which thought is dependent on logic-contrary to the first picture described. The argument for psycho-logicis…Read more
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75Our Knowledge of the Internal World * By ROBERT C. STALNAKERAnalysis 70 (2): 393-395. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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78A reply to Sean Liam Kelly's analysis of Martial 7.35 in the Fall 1993 issue of Nexus. Although I am in substantial agreement with many parts of Kelly's analysis, one detail of the text which he did not pick up on leads me to offer a different route to Kelly's conclusion that, according to the narrator of the poem, Laecania insults his and his slave's virility, and that in response to this perceived unmanning, he replies with the charge of lesbianism. However, the route I propose introduces into…Read more
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85Epistemic unitiesErkenntnis 59 (3). 2003.I bring together social ontology and social epistemology by consideringsocial entities (``epistemic unities'') that are constituted by the holdingof epistemic relations between their members. In particular, I focus onthe relation of taking someone as an expert. Among the types of structuresexamined are ones with a single expert and one or more non-experts whomay or may not know of each other's situation; and ones with more thanone expert, including cases in which the relation between the experts…Read more
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5390“But Is It Science Fiction?”: Science Fiction and a Theory of GenreMidwest Studies in Philosophy 39 (1): 1-28. 2015.If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one dominant but inadequate, the other better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, interrelated issues, focusing particularly on science fiction : what it is for a work to belong to a genre, the semantics of genre names, the validity of attempts to define genres,…Read more
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70An examination of some of the abuses of philosophical technique in Steven Katz's book _The Holocaust in Historical Context_.
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332Modal epistemology: Our knowledge of necessity and possibilityPhilosophy Compass 3 (4): 664-684. 2008.I survey a number of views about how we can obtain knowledge of modal propositions, propositions about necessity and possibility. One major approach is that whether a proposition or state of affairs is conceivable tells us something about whether it is possible. I examine two quite different positions that fall under this rubric, those of Yablo and Chalmers. One problem for this approach is the existence of necessary a posteriori truths and I deal with some of the ways in which these authors res…Read more
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679Essentially Contested Concepts and Semantic ExternalismJournal of the Philosophy of History 8 (1): 118-140. 2014.In 1956, W.B. Gallie introduced his idea of essentially contested concepts. In my paper, I offer a novel interpretation of his theory and argue that his theory, thus interpreted, is correct. The key to my interpretation lies in a condition Gallie places on essentially contested concepts that other interpreters downplay or dismiss: that the use of an essentially contested concept must be derived “from an original exemplar whose authority is acknowledged by all the contestant users of the concept.…Read more
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676Frege's diatribes against psychologism have often been taken to imply that he thought that logic and thought have nothing to do with each other. I argue against this interpretation and attribute to Frege a view on which the two are tightly connected. The connection, however, derives not from logic's being founded on the empirical laws of thought but rather from thought's depending constitutively on the application to it of logic. I call this view 'psycho-logicism.'
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123Personhood and future belief: two arguments for something like ReflectionErkenntnis 67 (1): 91-110. 2007.This paper offers two new arguments for a version of Reflection, the principle that says, roughly, that if one knew now what one would believe in the future, one ought to believe it now. The most prominent existing argument for the principle is the coherence-based Dutch Strategy argument advanced by Bas van Fraassen (and others). My two arguments are quite different. The first is a truth-based argument. On the basis of two substantive premises, that people’s beliefs generally get better over tim…Read more
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3Innate Principles and Radical InterpretationLocke Studies 18 33. 1987.This paper suggests that Locke's arguments against innate principles rest on a particular conception of what it is for things to be "in the mind." Understanding that notion in terms of presuppositions for radical interpretation allows us to see how some principle might be considered innate after all.
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49Freud's Ambiguous ConceptsJournal of Speculative Philosophy 3 (2). 1989.In this paper I propose to say something about why certain key psychoanalytic concepts, particularly that of the unconscious, are special because of a studied, and therapeutically important, ambiguity or paradoxicality which affects them. Before I examine these concepts, however, the first section of this paper discusses some of Sartre's views on psychological explanation. On the one hand, this gives me a way of introducing the dichotomy of self-evident irreducibility and existential lucidity wh…Read more
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234Constitution and qua objects in the ontology of musicBritish Journal of Aesthetics 49 (3): 203-217. 2009.Musical Platonists identify musical works with abstract sound structures but this implies that they are not created but only discovered. Jerrold Levinson adapts Platonism to allow for creation by identifying musical works with indicated sound structures. In this paper I explore the similarities between Levinson's view and Kit Fine's theory of qua objects. Fine offers the theory of qua objects as an account of constitution, as it obtains, for example, between a statue and the clay the statue is m…Read more
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719The universality of logic: On the connection between rationality and logical abilityMind 110 (438): 335-367. 2001.I argue for the thesis (UL) that there are certain logical abilities that any rational creature must have. Opposition to UL comes from naturalized epistemologists who hold that it is a purely empirical question which logical abilities a rational creature has. I provide arguments that any creatures meeting certain conditions—plausible necessary conditions on rationality—must have certain specific logical concepts and be able to use them in certain specific ways. For example, I argue that any crea…Read more
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55Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and OrganismsOxford University Press UK. 2016.Simon J. Evnine explores the view that some objects have matter from which they are distinct but that this distinctness is not due to the existence of anything like a form. He draws on Aristotle's insight that such objects must be understood in terms of an account that links what they are essentially with how they come to exist and what their functions are. Artifacts are the most prominent kind of objects where these three features coincide, and Evnine develops a detailed account of the existenc…Read more
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79Epistemic dimensions of personhoodOxford University Press. 2008.Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles gov…Read more
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19On the Way to LanguageIn Lewis Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Library of Living Philosophers), Open Court. 1999.The paper is an examination of how Davidson's holism constrains his account of language learning. The problem is that holism implies that in learning a language we cannot pass through stages of knowing part of the language. Rather, some sense must be found for the notion of partly knowing the whole language.
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2560Ready-Mades: Ontology and AestheticsBritish Journal of Aesthetics 53 (4): 407-423. 2013.I explore the interrelations between the ontological and aesthetic issues raised by ready-mades such as Duchamp’s Fountain. I outline a hylomorphic metaphysics which has two central features. First, hylomorphically complex objects have matter to which they are not identical. Secondly, when such objects are artefacts (including artworks), it is essential to them that they are the products of creative work on their matter. Against this background, I suggest that ready-mades are of aesthetic intere…Read more
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606Kinds and conscious experience: Is there anything that it is like to be something?Metaphilosophy 39 (2). 2008.In this article I distinguish the notion of there being something it is like to be a certain kind of creature from that of there being something it is like to have a certain kind of experience. Work on consciousness has typically dealt with the latter while employing the language of the former. I propose several ways of analyzing what it is like to be a certain kind of creature and find problems with them all. The upshot is that even if there is something it is like to have certain kinds of expe…Read more
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37A preface to the Japanese translation of my book _Donald Davidson_ in which I discuss two issues on which Davidson's thought developed substantially after the book was published. First, I explain a new argument, the triangulation argument, which has come to play a prominent part in Davidson’s recent work. Secondly, I enter in some detail into a continuing controversy over supervenience and the causal efficacy of the mental, since Davidson has advanced the issue with a new paper on the topic.
Coral Gables, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |