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124Unconscious Belief and Conscious ThoughtIn Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Phenomenal Intentionality, Oxford University Press. pp. 156-173. 2013.
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128Wine as an Aesthetic ObjectIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), Questions of Taste: the philosophy of wine, Oxford University Press. pp. 141-56. 2007.Art is one thing, the aesthetic another. Things can be appreciated aesthetically – for instance, in terms of the traditional category of the beautiful – without being works of art. A landscape can be appreciated as beautiful; so can a man or a woman. Appreciation of such natural objects in terms of their beauty certainly counts as aesthetic appreciation, if anything does. This is not simply because landscapes and people are not artefacts; for there are also artefacts which are assessable aesthet…Read more
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246The Origins of QualiaIn Tim Crane & Sarah Patterson (eds.), History of the Mind-Body Problem, Routledge. 2000.
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128The Nonconceptual Content of ExperienceIn The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception, Cambridge University Press. pp. 136-57. 1992.
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52Causation and Determinable Properties: On the Efficacy of Colour, Shape and SizeIn Jakob Hohwy & Jesper Kallestrup (eds.), Being Reduced: New Essays on Reduction, Explanation, and Causation, Oxford University Press. pp. 176-195. 2008.
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11Intentionality and Emotion: Comment on HuttoIn Richard Menary (ed.), Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Narrative : Focus on the Philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto, John Benjamins. pp. 107-119. 2006.I am very sympathetic to Dan Hutto’s view that in our experience of the emotions of others “we do not neutrally observe the outward behaviour of another and infer coldly, but on less than certain grounds, that they are in such and such an inner state, as justifi ed by analogy with our own case. Rather we react and feel as we do because it is natural for us to see and be moved by specifi c expressions of emotion in others” (Hutto section 4). Th is seems to me to be a good starting point for any a…Read more
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64Philosophy in the 20th century began and ended with an obsession with the problems of consciousness. But the specific problems discussed at each end of the century were very different, and reflection on how these differences developed will illuminate not just our understanding of the history of philosophy of consciousness, but also our understanding of consciousness itself. An interest in the problems of consciousness can be found in at least three movements in early 20th century philosophy: in …Read more
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204The significance of emergenceIn Carl Gillett & Barry Loewer (eds.), Physicalism and its Discontents, Cambridge University Press. 2001.This paper is an attempt to understand the content of, and motivation for, a popular form of physicalism, which I call ‘non-reductive physicalism’. Non-reductive physicalism claims although the mind is physical (in some sense), mental properties are nonetheless not identical to (or reducible to) physical properties. This suggests that mental properties are, in earlier terminology, ‘emergent properties’ of physical entities. Yet many non-reductive physicalists have denied this. In what follows, I…Read more
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2Steinvor tholl arnadottirIn Sophie Gibb, E. J. Lowe & Rögnvaldur Ingthorsson (eds.), Mental Causation and Ontology, Oxford University Press. pp. 248. 2013.
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2The waterfall illusionIn York H. Gunther (ed.), Essays on Nonconceptual Content, Mit Press. pp. 142. 2003.
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23Human Uniqueness and the Pursuit of KnowledgeIn Bana Bashour Hans Muller (ed.), Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications, Routledge. pp. 13--139. 2013.
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6Wine as an aesthetic objectIn Barry C. Smith (ed.), Questions of Taste: the philosophy of wine, Oxford University Press. pp. 141-156. 2007.
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206Subjective factsIn Hallvard Lillehammer & Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (eds.), Real Metaphysics: Essays in Honour of D. H. Mellor, Routledge. 2002.An important theme running through D.H. Mellor’s work is his realism, or as I shall call it, his objectivism: the idea that reality as such is how it is, regardless of the way we represent it, and that philosophical error often arises from confusing aspects of our subjective representation of the world with aspects of the world itself. Thus central to Mellor’s work on time has been the claim that the temporal A-series is unreal while the B-series is real. The A-series is something which is a pro…Read more
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372Intentionality and emotionIn Richard Menary (ed.), Radical Enactivism: Intentionality, Phenomenology, and Narrative : Focus on the Philosophy of Daniel D. Hutto, John Benjamins. pp. 107-119. 2006.I am very sympathetic to Dan Hutto’s view that in our experience of the emotions of others “we do not neutrally observe the outward behaviour of another and infer coldly, but on less than certain grounds, that they are in such and such an inner state, as justified by analogy with our own case. Rather we react and feel as we do because it is natural for us to see and be moved by specific expressions of emotion in others” (Hutto section 4). is seems to me to be a good starting point for any accoun…Read more
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Is There a Perceptual Relation?In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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171Is there a perceptual relation?In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.P.F. Strawson argued that ‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as … an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’ (1979: 97). He began his defence of this very natural idea by asking how someone might typically give a description of their current visual experience, and offered this example of such a description: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in …Read more
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Is there a perceptual relation?In Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.
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1IntentionalismIn Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 474--493. 2007.The central and defining characteristic of thoughts is that they have objects. The object of a thought is what the thought concerns, or what it is about. Since there cannot be thoughts which are not about anything, or which do not concern anything, there cannot be thoughts without objects. Mental states or events or processes which have objects in this sense are traditionally called ‘intentional,’ and ‘intentionality’ is for this reason the general term for this defining characteristic of though…Read more
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1Is there a perceptual relationIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press. 2006.P.F. Strawson argued that ‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as … an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’ (1979: 97). He began his defence of this very natural idea by asking how someone might typically give a description of their current visual experience, and offered this example of such a description: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in …Read more
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3MetaphysicsIn A. C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: a guide through the subject, Oxford University Press. 1995.
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27Is Religious Belief a Kind of Belief?Neue Zeitschrift für Systematicsche Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 65 (4): 414-429. 2023.This paper discusses the familiar question of whether expressions of faith or conviction offered by religious believers really express their beliefs, in the standard sense of ‘belief’ used in philosophy and psychology. Some hold that these expressions do not express genuine beliefs because they do not meet the standards of rationality, coherence and integration which govern beliefs. So they must serve some other function. But this picture of ‘genuine belief’ is inadequate, for reasons independen…Read more
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4Replies to Gäb, Schmidt and ScottNeue Zeitschrift für Systematicsche Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 65 (4): 458-463. 2023.This article replies to criticism of my article, “Is Religious Belief a Kind of Belief?” by Sebastian Gäb, Eva Schmidt and Michael Scott.
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4Is Perception a Propositional Attitude?In Fiona Macpherson (ed.), The Admissible Contents of Experience, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.It is widely agreed that perceptual experience is a form of intentionality, i.e., that it has representational content. Many philosophers take this to mean that like belief, experience has propositional content, that it can be true or false. I accept that perceptual experience has intentionality; but I dispute the claim that it has propositional content. This claim does not follow from the fact that experience is intentional, nor does it follow from the fact that experiences are accurate or inac…Read more
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3Philosophy, Logic, Science, HistoryIn Armen T. Marsoobian, Eric Cavallero & Alexis Papazoglou (eds.), The Pursuit of Philosophy, Wiley. 2012-08-29.This chapter contains sections titled: Philosophy Logic Science History Acknowledgments References.
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4Intentional ObjectsRatio 14 (4): 336-349. 2002.The idea of an intentional object, or an object of thought, gives rise to a dilemma for theories of intentionality. Either intentional objects are existing objects, in which case it is impossible, contrary to appearances, to think about something which does not exist. Or some intentional objects are non‐existent real objects. But this requires an obscure and implausible metaphysics. I argue that the way out of this dilemma is to deny that being an intentional object is being an entity of any kin…Read more
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1Brentano's concept of intentional inexistenceIn Markus Textor (ed.), The Austrian contribution to analytic philosophy, Routledge. 2006.
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2Causes and Coincidences, by David Owen (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (1): 146-148. 1996.
Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |