•  503
    Deliberation and Acting for Reasons
    Philosophical 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
  •  5
    Desire and Pleasure
    In 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.
  •  17
    A Sentimentalist Theory of Mind, by Michael Slote
    Mind 125 (497): 228-231. 2016.
  •  47
    On 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
  •  54
    Replies to Critics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2): 509-515. 2014.
  •  599
    Praise, Blame and the Whole Self
    Philosophical 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
  •  144
    Précis of In Praise of Desire
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (2): 490-495. 2014.
  •  141
    Alienation and Externality
    Canadian 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.
  •  40
    A Casual Theory of Acting for Reasons
    American 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
  •  206
    In Praise of Desire
    Oxford 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
  •  48
    Book Forum on In Praise of Desire
    Journal of Value Inquiry 50 (2): 425-432. 2016.
  •  26
    Response to Swanton and Badhwar
    Journal of Value Inquiry 50 (2): 445-448. 2016.
  •  201
    The Causal Map and Moral Psychology
    Philosophical 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
  •  85
    On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion
    Philosophical Review Recent Issues 125 (2): 287-289. 2016.
  •  135
    On the content of experience
    with Ben Caplan
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.
    The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience
  •  81
    An Ontology of Ideas
    Journal 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 Representation
    Dissertation, 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
  •  53
    Functions From Regulation
    The 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
  •  6
    Review of Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (3). 2006.
  •  87
    Pleasure, displeasure, and representation
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (4): 507-530. 2001.
    The object of the present work is to rectify the neglect that pleasure and displeasure have been suffering from in the philosophy of mind, and to give an account of pleasure and displeasure which reveals a striking degree of unity and theoretical tractabiliy underlying the diverse phenomena: a representationalist account.
  •  112
    Monsters Among Us
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (sup1): 167-184. 2001.
    There are monsters that scare children and monsters that scare grownups, and then there are monsters that scare philosophers of mind. This paper is concerned with this third sort of monster, whose primary representative is the zombie—a living being, physically just like a person but lacking consciousness. Though zombies act like normal people and appear to have normal brains, everything is blank inside. Unfortunately, the term ‘zombie’ covers a narrower class of deficits than is convenient, fail…Read more
  •  28
    Two Ways of Seeing Ways of Seeing
    Dialogue 46 (2): 341-345. 2007.
    A brief critical essay on Marc Jeannerod and Pierre Jacob's book, Ways of Seeing. The essay praises Jeannerod and Jacob for their insightful treatment of the recent neuroscience of vision, and raises questions about their teleosemantic theory of mind.
  •  161
    Donald Davidson's theory of mind is non-normative
    Philosophers' Imprint 3 1-14. 2003.
    Donald Davidson's theory of mind is widely regarded as a normative theory. This is a something of a confusion. Once a distinction has been made between the categorisation scheme of a norm and the norm's force-maker, it becomes clear that a Davidsonian theory of mind is not a normative theory after all. Making clear the distinction, applying it to Davidson's theory of mind, and showing its significance are the main purposes of this paper. In the concluding paragraphs, a sketch is given of how a t…Read more