•  3
    European and American Philosophers
    with John Marenbon, Douglas Kellner, Richard D. Parry, Gregory Schufreider, Ralph McInerny, Andrea Nye, R. M. Dancy, Vernon J. Bourke, A. A. Long, James F. Harris, Thomas Oberdan, Paul S. MacDonald, Véronique M. Fóti, F. Rosen, James Dye, Pete A. Y. Gunter, Lisa J. Downing, W. J. Mander, Peter Simons, Maurice Friedman, Robert C. Solomon, Nigel Love, Mary Pickering, Andrew Reck, Iakovos Vasiliou, John C. Coker, Georges Dicker, James Gouinlock, Paul J. Welty, Gianluigi Oliveri, Jack Zupko, Tom Rockmore, Wayne M. Martin, Ladelle McWhorter, Hans-Johann Glock, Georgia Warnke, John Haldane, Joseph S. Ullian, Steven Rieber, David Ingram, Nick Fotion, George Rainbolt, Thomas Sheehan, Gerald J. Massey, Barbara D. Massey, David E. Cooper, David Gauthier, James M. Humber, J. N. Mohanty, Michael H. Dearmey, Oswald O. Schrag, Ralf Meerbote, George J. Stack, John P. Burgess, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Nicholas Jolley, Adriaan T. Peperzak, E. J. Lowe, William D. Richardson, Stephen Mulhall, and C.
    In 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
  •  8
    Philosophy Through Memes
    In Lee McIntyre, Nancy McHugh & Ian Olasov (eds.), A Companion to Public Philosophy, Wiley. 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
  •  16
    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
  •  22
    The Historicity of Artifacts: Use and Counter-Use
    Metaphysics 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
  •  222
    Mass Production
    In 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
  •  461
    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
  •  145
    The Anonymity of a Murmur: Internet Memes
    British 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
  •  54
    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.
  • The Relations Between Logic and Thought
    Dissertation, 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
  •  158
    Donald Davidson
    Stanford University Press. 1991.
    Donald Davidson is unquestionably one of America's greatest living philosophers. His influence on Anglo-American philosophy over the last twenty years has been enormous, and his work is an unavoidable reference point in current debates in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. This book offers a systematic and accessible introduction to Davidson's work. Evnine begins by discussing Davidson's contribution to the philosophy of mind, including his views on action, events and causati…Read more
  •  75
    Understanding madness?
    Ratio 2 (1): 1-18. 1989.
    The paper contrasts two ways of understanding the apparently strange assertions of mad persons, finds them both problematic, and proposes an alternative. The first approach, exemplified by R.D. Laing, is to suppose that the beliefs of the mad person are ordinary but expressed in terms that make them appear irrational. The other approach, advocated by Silvano Arieti, is to take the words at face value but to attribute to the mad person a kind of deviant logic. I suggest, on the basis of a Davidso…Read more
  •  148
    Constitution is the relation between something and what it is made of. Composition is the relation between something and its parts. I examine three different approaches to the relation between constitution and composition. One approach, associated with neo-Aristotelians like Mark Johnston and Kathrin Koslicki, identifies constitution with composition. A second, popular with those sympathetic to classical mereology such as Judith Thomson, defines constitution in terms of parthood. A third, advoca…Read more
  •  66
    (No abstract is available for this citation)
  •  72
    A 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
  •  76
    Epistemic unities
    Erkenntnis 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
  •  4979
    “But Is It Science Fiction?”: Science Fiction and a Theory of Genre
    Midwest 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
  •  66
    An examination of some of the abuses of philosophical technique in Steven Katz's book _The Holocaust in Historical Context_.
  •  318
    Modal epistemology: Our knowledge of necessity and possibility
    Philosophy 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
  •  26
    God Without the Supernatural (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 16 (4): 573-577. 1999.
  •  623
    Essentially Contested Concepts and Semantic Externalism
    Journal 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
  •  589
    Frege'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.'
  •  119
    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
  •  3
    Innate Principles and Radical Interpretation
    Locke 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.
  •  44
    Freud's Ambiguous Concepts
    Journal 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
  •  223
    Constitution and qua objects in the ontology of music
    British 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
  •  671
    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
  •  40
    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
  •  14
    God Without the Supernatural (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 16 (4): 573-577. 1999.
  •  53
    Epistemic dimensions of personhood
    Oxford 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
  •  9
    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.