-
515Deliberation and Acting for ReasonsPhilosophical Review 121 (2): 209-239. 2012.Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons. To hold that all voluntary activities are performed for reasons in virtue of their relations to past, present, or even merely possible acts of deliberation thus leads to infinite regresses and related problems. As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons, and these pro…Read more
-
6Desire and PleasureIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: Action ‐ Based Theories of Desire Pleasure ‐ Based Theories of Desire Combined Action ‐ Based and Pleasure ‐ Based Theories Holistic Theories of Desire Natural Kind Theories The Nature of Pleasure References.
-
The reward theory of desire in moral psychologyIn Justin D'Arms & Daniel Jacobson (eds.), Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2014.
-
48On Clear and Confused Ideas (review)Dialogue 42 (1): 148-149. 2003.Here is an apparently straightforward philosophical story about concepts. In the style of Jerry Fodor, a concept is a mental “word” ; it means what it does because of its causal dependencies, and it contributes this meaning to the meanings of the mental “sentences” it helps to form. The mental word OWL means owls because owls have a special causal relationship to OWLs, and when the mental word OWL is combined with other mental words, such as THERE, IS, AN and NEARBY, the meaning of the resulting…Read more
-
601Praise, Blame and the Whole SelfPhilosophical Studies 93 (2): 161-188. 1999.What is that makes an act subject to either praise or blame? The question has often been taken to depend entirely on the free will debate for an answer, since it is widely agreed that an agent’s act is subject to praise or blame only if it was freely willed, but moral theory, action theory, and moral psychology are at least equally relevant to it. In the last quarter-century, following the lead of Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) seminal article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the in…Read more
-
151Alienation and ExternalityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (3): 371-387. 1999.Harry Frankfurt introduces the concept of externality. Externality is supposed to be a fact about the structure of an agent's will. We argue that the pre-theorethical basis of externality has a lot more to do with feelings of alienation than it does with the will. Once we realize that intuitions about externality are guided by intuitions about feelings of alienation surprising conclusions follow regarding the structure of our will.
-
40A Casual Theory of Acting for ReasonsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 52 (2): 103-114. 2015.Amanda works in a library, and a patron asks for her help in learning about duty-to- rescue laws in China. She throws herself into the task, spending hours on retrieving documents from governmental and non-governmental sources, getting electronic translations, looking for literature on Scandinavian duty-to-rescue laws that mention Chinese laws for comparison, and so on. Why? She likes to gain this sort of general knowledge of the world; perhaps the reason she works so hard is that she is learnin…Read more
-
214In Praise of DesireOxford University Press. 2013.Joining the debate over the roles of reason and appetite in the moral mind, In Praise of Desire takes the side of appetite. Acting for moral reasons, acting in a praiseworthy manner, and acting out of virtue are simply acting out of intrinsic desires for the right or the good
-
219The Causal Map and Moral PsychologyPhilosophical Quarterly 67 (267): 347-369. 2016.Some philosophers hold that the neuroscience of action is, in practice or in principle, incapable of touching debates in action theory and moral psychology. The role of desires in action, the existence of basic actions, and the like are topics that must be sorted out by philosophers alone: at least at present, and perhaps by the very nature of the questions. This paper examines both philosophical and empirical arguments against the relevance of neuroscience to such questions and argues that neit…Read more
-
88On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex EmotionPhilosophical Review Recent Issues 125 (2): 287-289. 2016.
-
138On the content of experiencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience
-
89An Ontology of IdeasJournal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (4): 757-775. 2015.Philosophers often talk about and engage with ideas. Scientists, artists, and historians do, too. But what is an idea? In this paper, we first motivate the desire for an ontology of ideas before discussing what conditions a candidate ontology would have to satisfy to be minimally adequate. We then offer our own account of the ontology of ideas, and consider various strategies for specifying the underlying metaphysics of the account. We conclude with a discussion of potential future work to be do…Read more
-
Foundations of Mental RepresentationDissertation, Stanford University. 1998.There is a familiar if disputed theory of mental representations which holds that to be a mental representation is to be a structure whose states are supposed to stand in correspondence to states of the world . The present work defends this so-called teleosemantic approach to mental representations against Stampian and Fodorian approaches, and develops a novel approach to the normativity underlying mental representation. It is argued that, while appealing to evolutionary functions in attributing…Read more
-
54Functions From RegulationThe Monist 87 (1): 115-135. 2004.Here is a rather mundane set of claims about the stapler on my desk: The function of my stapler is to staple sheets of paper together. If the stapler is loaded with staples, but for some reason will not staple papers, the stapler is malfunctioning. That is, it is not doing what it is supposed to do. It is defective, or misshapen, misaligned or inadequate to its task, or in some other way normatively defective: there is something wrong with it. The reason that my stapler has its function, and is …Read more
-
105Unexpected pleasureIn Luc Faucher & Christine Tappolet (eds.), The Modularity of Emotions, University of Calgary Press. pp. 255-272. 2007.As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive tract, feels an impressive numb…Read more
-
62Reasons, Causes, and the Extended Mind HypothesisErkenntnis 81 (1): 41-57. 2016.In this paper we develop a novel argument against the extended mind hypothesis. Our argument constitutes an advance in the debate, insofar as we employ only premises that are acceptable to a coarse-grained functionalist, and we do not rely on functional disanalogies between putative examples of extended minds and ordinary human beings that are just a matter of fine detail or degree. Thus, we beg no questions against proponents of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather, our argument consists in mak…Read more
-
18Review of Graham MacDonald, David Papineau (eds.), Teleosemantics: New Philosophical Essays (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (4). 2007.
-
333Propositional attitudesPhilosophy Compass 1 (1): 65-73. 2006.The propositional attitudes are attitudes such as believing and desiring, taken toward propositions such as the proposition that snow flurries are expected, or that the Prime Minister likes poutine. Collectively, our views about the propositional attitudes make up much of folk psychology, our everyday theory of how the mind works.
-
41There is a doctrine in the theory of consciousness known as representationalism, or intentionalism. According to this doctrine, what it feels like to be in a particular state of consciousness — the qualitative character of that state — is identical to the content of some mental representation(s) For instance, the state of consciousness I am enjoying just now as I see a pattern of sunlight and shadow falling on my wall is, in part, a state of consciousness that presents to me a patch of light gre…Read more
-
22Blindsight and the Nature of Consciousness Jason Holt Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003, 153 pp., $24.95 paper (review)Dialogue 44 (1): 196-. 2005.
-
206Three Faces of DesireOxford University Press. 2004.To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard account holds the hedonic face of desire …Read more
-
1Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 21 (4): 235-237. 2001.
Houston, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Desire |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Philosophy of Action |
Moral Psychology |
Moral Reasoning and Motivation |
Musical Works |