University College London
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2008
Stirling, Scotland, UK
  •  501
    There is No Exclusion Problem
    with Tim Crane
    In E. J. Lowe, S. Gibb & R. D. Ingthorsson (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 248-66. 2013.
    Many philosophers want to say both that everything is determined by the physical and subject to physical laws and principles, and that certain mental entities cannot be identified with any physical entities. The problem of mental causation is to make these two assumptions compatible with the causal efficacy of the mental. The concern is that this physicalist picture of the world leaves no space for the causal efficacy of anything non-physical. The physical, as it is sometimes said, excludes anyt…Read more
  •  238
    Functionalism and thinking animals
    Philosophical Studies 147 (3). 2008.
    Lockean accounts of personal identity face a problem of too many thinkers arising from their denial that we are identical to our animals and the assumption that our animals can think. Sydney Shoemaker has responded to this problem by arguing that it is a consequence of functionalism that only things with psychological persistence conditions can have mental properties, and thus that animals cannot think. I discuss Shoemaker’s argument and demonstrate two ways in which it fails. Functionalism does…Read more
  •  171
    Bodily Thought and the Corpse Problem
    European Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 575-592. 2011.
    : A key consideration in favour of animalism—the thesis that persons like you and me are identical to the animals we walk around with—is that it avoids a too many thinkers problem that arises for non-animalist positions. The problem is that it seems that any person-constituting animal would itself be able to think, but if wherever there is a thinking person there is a thinking animal distinct from it then there are at least two thinkers wherever there is a thinking person. Most find this result …Read more
  •  72
    Overdetermination and Elimination
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (4): 479-503. 2015.
    I focus on two arguments, due to Jaegwon Kim and Trenton Merricks, that move from claims about the sufficiency of one class of causes to the reduction or elimination of another class of entity, via claims about overdetermination. I argue that in order to validate their move from sufficiency to reduction or elimination, both Kim and Merricks must assume that there can be no ‘weak overdetermination’; i.e., that no single effect can have numerically distinct but dependently sufficient causes occurr…Read more