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A participatory model of the atonementIn Yujin Nagasawa & Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New waves in philosophy of religion, Palgrave-macmillan. 2008.In this paper we develop a participatory model of the Christian doctrine of the atonement, according to which the atonement involves participating in the death and resurrection of Christ. In part one we argue that current models of the atonement—exemplary, penal, substitutionary and merit models—are unsatisfactory. The central problem with these models is that they assume a purely deontic conception of sin and, as a result, they fail to address sin as a relational and ontological problem. In par…Read more
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5Hypnosis and the Unity of ConsciousnessIn Hypnosis and Conscious States: The Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective, Oxford University Press. pp. 93--109. 2007.Hypnosis appears to generate unusual---and sometimes even astonishing---changes in the contents of consciousness. Hypnotic subjects report perceiving things that are not there, they report not perceiving things that are there, and they report unusual alterations in the phenomenology of agency. In addition to apparent alterations in the contents of consciousness, hypnosis also appears to involve alterations in the structure of consciousness. According to many theorists---most notably Hilgard---hy…Read more
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238The feeling of doing: Deconstructing the phenomenology of agnecyIn Natalie Sebanz & Wolfgang Prinz (eds.), Disorders of Volition, Bradford Books. 2009.Disorders of volition are often accompanied by, and may even be caused by, disruptions in the phenomenology of agency. Yet the phenomenology of agency is at present little explored. In this paper we attempt to describe the experience of normal agency, in order to uncover its representational content
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874Doing without Deliberation: Automatism, Automaticity, and Moral Accountability,International Review of Psychiatry 16 (4): 209-15. 2004.Actions performed in a state of automatism are not subject to moral evaluation, while automatic actions often are. Is the asymmetry between automatistic and automatic agency justified? In order to answer this question we need a model or moral accountability that does justice to our intuitions about a range of modes of agency, both pathological and non-pathological. Our aim in this paper is to lay the foundations for such an account.
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299A will of one's own: Consciousness, control, and characterInternational Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27 (5): 459-470. 2004.
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What is the unity of consciousnessIn Axel Cleeremans (ed.), The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation, Oxford University Press. pp. 497-539. 2003.At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing…Read more
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83Tests for consciousness in humans and beyondTrends in Cognitive Sciences 29. 2024.Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness (‘C-tests’) are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural organoids, and xenobot technology. Although a number of C-tests have been proposed in recent years, most ar…Read more
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351A participatory model of the atonementIn Yujin Nagasawa & Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New waves in philosophy of religion, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 150. 2008.In this paper we develop a participatory model of the Christian doctrine of the atonement, according to which the atonement involves participating in the death and resurrection of Christ. In part one we argue that current models of the atonement—exemplary, penal, substitutionary and merit models—are unsatisfactory. The central problem with these models is that they assume a purely deontic conception of sin and, as a result, they fail to address sin as a relational and ontological problem. In par…Read more
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68The Case Against Organoid ConsciousnessNeuroethics 17 (1): 1-15. 2024.Neural organoids are laboratory-generated entities that replicate certain structural and functional features of the human brain. Most neural organoids are disembodied—completely decoupled from sensory input and motor output. As such, questions about their potential capacity for consciousness are exceptionally difficult to answer. While not disputing the need for caution regarding certain neural organoid types, this paper appeals to two broad constraints on any adequate theory of consciousness—th…Read more
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5Delusions, Self-Deception and Affective Influences on Belief-Formation (edited book)Psychology Press. 2008.This collection of essays focuses on the interface between delusions and self-deception. As pathologies of belief, delusions and self-deception raise many of the same challenges for those seeking to understand them. Are delusions and self-deception entirely distinct phenomena, or might some forms of self-deception also qualify as delusional? To what extent might models of self-deception and delusion share common factors? In what ways do affect and motivation enter into normal belief-formation, a…Read more
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46In search of the beatMind and Language 38 (3): 907-924. 2023.Beat perception has received very little attention from either philosophers of mind or philosophers of music. This neglect is unfortunate, for the topic is rich with philosophical interest. This article addresses two questions. The first concerns the nature of our experience of musical beat. Here, we argue that experiences of beat are forms of auditory perception. The second question concerns the nature of musical beat itself: what are beats? We defend a form of anthropocentric realism about bea…Read more
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233Cognitive Phenomenology (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2011.Does thought have distinctive experiential features? Is there, in addition to sensory phenomenology, a kind of cognitive phenomenology--phenomenology of a cognitive or conceptual character? Leading philosophers of mind debate whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology and whether it is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion.
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26Problems with Unity of Consciousness Arguments for Substance DualismIn Jonathan J. Loose, Angus John Louis Menuge & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.In the early modern period one can find unity of consciousness arguments in the writings of Rene Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, and in the recent literature they have been defended by David Barnett, William Hasker, and Richard Swinburne (among others). Descartes's unity of consciousness argument for dualism is to be found in the sixth of his Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes claims that his unity of consciousness argument was itself sufficient to establish substance dualism. Swinburne's c…Read more
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212The unity of consciousness: Clarification and defenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 78 (2): 248-254. 2000.In "The Disunity of Consciousness," Gerard O'Brien and Jon Opie argue that human consciousness is not synchronically unified. They suggest that the orthodox conception of the unity of consciousness admits of two readings, neither of which they find persuasive. According to them, "a conscious individual does not have a single consciousness, but several distinct phenomenal consciousnesses, at least one for each of the senses, running in parallel." They call this conception of consciousness the _mu…Read more
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382Introspective humilityPhilosophical Issues 20 (1): 1-22. 2010.Viewed from a certain perspective, nothing can seem more secure than introspection. Consider an ordinary conscious episode—say, your current visual experience of the colour of this page. You can judge, when reflecting on this experience, that you have a visual experience as of something white with black marks before you. Does it seem reasonable to doubt this introspective judgement? Surely not—such doubt would seem utterly fanciful. The trustworthiness of introspection is not only assumed by com…Read more
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442Amputees by choice: Body integrity identity disorder and the ethics of amputationJournal of Applied Philosophy 22 (1). 2005.In 1997, a Scottish surgeon by the name of Robert Smith was approached by a man with an unusual request: he wanted his apparently healthy lower left leg amputated. Although details about the case are sketchy, the would-be amputee appears to have desired the amputation on the grounds that his left foot wasn’t part of him – it felt alien. After consultation with psychiatrists, Smith performed the amputation. Two and a half years later, the patient reported that his life had been transformed for th…Read more
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A participatory model of the atonementIn Yujin Nagasawa & Erik J. Wielenberg (eds.), New waves in philosophy of religion, Palgrave-macmillan. 2008.
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Multisensory perceptionIn Mohan Matthen (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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Belief and Its BedfellowsIn Nikolaj Nottelmann (ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure, Palgrave. 2013.
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9Delusion and confabulation: mistakes of perceiving, remembering and believingCognitive Neuropsychiatry 15 (1): 319-45. 2010.
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Delusion and the Norms of RationalityIn Timothy Joseph Lane & Tzu-Wei Hung (eds.), Rationality: Constraints and Contexts, Elsevier Academic Press. pp. 77-94. 2016.
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64Philosophy of Mind: An IntroductionRoutledge. 2021.Developments in the philosophy of mind over the last 20 years have dramatically changed the nature of the subject. In this major new introduction, Tim Bayne presents an outstanding overview of many of the key topics, problems, and debates, taking account not only of changes in philosophy of mind itself but also of important developments in the scientific study of the mind. The following topics are discussed in depth: What distinguishes a physicalist conception of the mind? Behaviourism,…Read more
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149Consciousness, Concepts and Natural KindsPhilosophical Topics 48 (1): 65-83. 2020.We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants…Read more
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73Explanation in the science of consciousness: From the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) to the difference makers of consciousnessPhilosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (II). 2020.At present, the science of consciousness is structured around the search for the neural correlates of consciousness. One of the alleged advantages of the NCCs framework is its metaphysical neutrality—the fact that it begs no contested questions with respect to debates about the fundamental nature of consciousness. Here, we argue that even if the NCC framework is metaphysically neutral, it is structurally committed, for it presupposes a certain model—what we call the Lite-Brite model—of conscious…Read more
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4Free Will and the Phenomenology of AgencyIn Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith & Neil Levy (eds.), Routledge Companion to Free Will., Routledge. pp. 633-644. 2017.
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47A Taxonomy for Disorders of Consciousness That Takes Consciousness SeriouslyAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 8 (3): 153-155. 2017.
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22Philosophy of Religion: A Very Short IntroductionOxford University Press. 2018.Philosophy of religion contains some of our most burning questions about the role of religion in the world, and the relationship between believers and God. Tim Bayne considers the core debates surrounding the concept of God; the relationship between faith and reason; and the problem of evil, before looking at reincarnation and the afterlife.
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113Ensemble representation and the contents of visual experiencePhilosophical Studies 176 (3): 733-753. 2019.The on-going debate over the ‘admissible contents of perceptual experience’ concerns the range of properties that human beings are directly acquainted with in perceptual experience. Regarding vision, it is relatively uncontroversial that the following properties can figure in the contents of visual experience: colour, shape, illumination, spatial relations, motion, and texture. The controversy begins when we ask whether any properties besides these figure in visual experience. We argue that ‘ens…Read more
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97VI—Gist!Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (2): 107-126. 2016.A central debate in the philosophy of perception concerns the range of properties that can be represented in perceptual experience. Are the contents of perceptual experience restricted to ‘low-level’ properties such as location, shape and texture, or can ‘high-level’ properties such as being a tomato, being a pine tree or being a watch also be represented in perceptual experience? This paper explores the bearing of gist perception on the admissible contents debate, arguing that it provides quali…Read more
Clayton, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |