•  7
    Poetics
    with W. Hamilton Aristotle, W. Rhys Longinus, Demetrius , and Fyfe
    Focus. 2006.
    A complete translation of Aristotle's classic that is both faithful and readable, along with an introduction that provides the modern reader with a means of understanding this seminal work and its impact on our culture. In this volume, Joe Sachs (translator of Aristotle's _Physics, Metaphysics,_ and the _Nicomachean Ethics _)also supplements his excellent translation with well-chosen notes and glossary of important terms. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpre…Read more
  •  75
    As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person's emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account o…Read more
  •  15
    Introduction: Loneliness
    Topoi 42 (5): 1079-1081. 2023.
  •  152
    How to do things with deepfakes
    Synthese 201 (2): 1-18. 2023.
    In this paper, I draw a distinction between two types of deepfake, and unpack the deceptive strategies that are made possible by the second. The first category, which has been the focus of existing literature on the topic, consists of those deepfakes that act as a fabricated record of events, talk, and action, where any utterances included in the footage are not addressed to the audience of the deepfake. For instance, a fake video of two politicians conversing with one another. The second catego…Read more
  •  295
    How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix…Read more
  •  165
    Social Doubt
    with Lucy Osler
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association (1): 1-18. 2023.
    We introduce two concepts—social certainty and social doubt—that help to articulate a variety of experiences of the social world, such as shyness, self-consciousness, culture shock, and anxiety. Following Carel's (2013) analysis of bodily doubt, which explores how a person's tacit confidence in the workings of their body can be disrupted and undermined in illness, we consider how an individual's faith in themselves as a social agent, too, can be compromised or lost, thus altering their experienc…Read more
  •  413
    Loneliness and absence in psychopathology
    Topoi 42 (5): 1-16. 2023.
    Loneliness is a near-universal experience. It is particularly common for individuals with (so-called) psychopathological conditions or disorders. In this paper, we explore the experiential character of loneliness, with a specific emphasis on how social goods are experienced as absent in ways that involve a diminished sense of agency and recognition. We explore the role and experience of loneliness in three case studies: depression, anorexia nervosa, and autism. We demonstrate that even though ex…Read more
  •  39
    Feeling Fit For Function: Haptic Touch and Aesthetic Experience
    British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1): 49-61. 2022.
    Traditionally, the sense of touch—alongside the senses of taste and smell—has been excluded from the aesthetic domain. These proximal modalities are thought to deliver only sensory pleasures, not the complex, world-directed perceptual states that characterize aesthetic experience. In this paper, I argue that this tradition fails to recognize the perceptual possibilities of haptic touch, which allows us to experience properties of the objects with which we make bodily contact, including their wei…Read more
  •  357
    Extending the extended mind: the case for extended affectivity
    Philosophical Studies 172 (5): 1243-1263. 2015.
    The thesis of the extended mind (ExM) holds that the material underpinnings of an individual’s mental states and processes need not be restricted to those contained within biological boundaries: when conditions are right, material artefacts can be incorporated by the thinking subject in such a way as to become a component of her extended mind. Up to this point, the focus of this approach has been on phenomena of a distinctively cognitive nature, such as states of dispositional belief, and proces…Read more
  •  1587
    Out of our heads: Addiction and psychiatric externalism
    with Shane Glackin and Joel Krueger
    Behavioral Brain Research 398 1-8. 2021.
    In addiction, apparently causally significant phenomena occur at a huge number of levels; addiction is affected by biomedical, neurological, pharmacological, clinical, social, and politico-legal factors, among many others. In such a complex, multifaceted field of inquiry, it seems very unlikely that all the many layers of explanation will prove amenable to any simple or straightforward, reductive analysis; if we are to unify the many different sciences of addiction while respecting their causal …Read more
  •  441
    According to the evaluativist theory of bodily pain, the overall phenomenology of a painful experience is explained by attributing to it two types of representational content—an indicative content that represents bodily damage or disturbance, and an evaluative content that represents that condition as bad for the subject. This paper considers whether evaluativism can offer a suitable explanation of aversive auditory phenomenology—the experience of awful noises—and argues that it can only do so b…Read more
  •  1091
    Loneliness and the Emotional Experience of Absence
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (2): 185-204. 2020.
    In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense of being unable to realise o…Read more
  •  32
    Extending Emotional Consciousness
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (3-4): 108-128. 2015.
    Recent work on extended mind theory has considered whether the material realizers of phenomenally conscious states might be distributed across both body and world. A popular framework for understanding perceptual consciousness in world-involving terms is sensorimotor enactivism, which holds that subjects make direct sensory contact with objects by means of their active, exploratory skills. In this paper, I consider the case of emotional experience, and argue that although the enactivist view doe…Read more
  •  1046
    Externalist theories hold that a comprehensive understanding of mental disorder cannot be achieved unless we attend to factors that lie outside of the head: neural explanations alone will not fully capture the complex dependencies that exist between an individual’s psychiatric condition and her social, cultural, and material environment. Here, we firstly offer a taxonomy of ways in which the externalist viewpoint can be understood, and unpack its commitments concerning the nature and physical re…Read more
  •  126
    Feeling nothing: Numbness and emotional absence
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (1): 187-198. 2018.
    I argue that it is possible for a subject to undergo experiences of emotional absence, during which she becomes aware of her own failure to be moved by the world around her. Just as a part of one's body feels numb when it manifestly fails to incur the ordinary sensory consequences of transactions at the surface of the skin, so an individual feels emotional absence when her affective condition manifestly fails to vary in predictable ways as she navigates her surroundings. Experiences of emotional…Read more
  •  10
    Action and experience
    Dissertation, University of Edinburgh. 2008.
    The project examines the relationship between perception and action, and is divided into two parts. The first establishes a detailed philosophical critique of recent sensorimotor or enactive approaches to perception, targeting in particular the work of Alva Noë. In the second part I defend what may be called an 'action-space' account, according to which conscious experience is constituted by an agent's representing his surroundings in such a way as to enable a certain suite of actions. The enact…Read more
  •  107
    Aesthetic virtues: traits and faculties
    Philosophical Studies 175 (2): 429-447. 2018.
    Two varieties of aesthetic virtue are distinguished. Trait virtues are features of the agent’s character, and reflect an overarching concern for aesthetic goods such as beauty and novelty, while faculty virtues are excellences of artistic execution that permit the agent to succeed in her chosen domain. The distinction makes possible a fuller account of why art matters to us—it matters not only insofar as it is aesthetically good, but also in its capacity as an achievement that is creditable to a…Read more
  •  40
    The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (review)
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 26 (1): 87-90. 2011.
  •  94
    Taking responsibility for cognitive extension
    Philosophical Psychology 25 (4): 1-11. 2012.
    The Hypothesis of Extended Cognition holds that the mind need not be constrained within biological boundaries. However, conditions must be provided to set a principled outer limit on cognitive extension, or implausibly many cases will be implicated. I argue that, for the case of extended beliefs at least, such conditions must pay attention to a mental state's causal history, in addition to its current functional poise. Extended resources can house an individual's beliefs, I propose, only if she …Read more
  •  92
    Emotional Regulation and Responsibility
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (3): 487-500. 2015.
    I argue that one’s responsibility for one’s emotions has a two-fold structure: one bears direct responsibility for emotions insofar as they are the upshot of first-order evaluative judgements concerning reasons of fit; and one bears derivative responsibility for them insofar as they are consequences of activities of emotional self-regulation, which can reflect one’s take on second-order reasons concerning the strategic, prudential, or moral desirability of undergoing a particular emotion in a pa…Read more
  •  114
    Understanding 'sensorimotor understanding'
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (1): 101-111. 2010.
    Sensorimotor theories understand perception to be a process of active, exploratory engagement with the environment, mediated by the possession and exercise of a certain body of knowledge concerning sensorimotor dependencies. This paper aims to characterise that exercise, and to show that it places constraints upon the content of sensorimotor knowledge itself. Sensorimotor mastery is exercised when it is put to use in the service of intentional action-planning and selection, and this rules out ce…Read more
  •  98
    A Breath of Fresh Air: Absence and the Structure of Olfactory Perception
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (3): 400-420. 2016.
    The question of whether we can perceive absences, in addition to ‘positives’, has received recent attention in the literature on the nature of vision and audition. The aim is to demonstrate that there can be objectless forms of perceptual consciousness; specifically, to show that such episodes can be distinguished from those in which there is merely no perception at all. The current article explores this question for the domain of olfaction, and argues that there can be experiences of the absenc…Read more
  •  2
    Guidance, Selection, and Representation: Response to Anderson and Rosenberg
    Journal of Mind and Behavior 30 (4): 291-299. 2009.
    Anderson and Rosenberg’s guidance theory of representation offers an analysis of mental content that strongly emphasises the influence that intentional states have upon the production and modulation of bodily behavior. On this view, a mental state gains both its status as a representation, and its content, in virtue of occupying a particular role in the guidance of action. I present three related challenges for the guidance theory, before defending an alternative model that is grounded not in ac…Read more
  •  69
    You do the maths: rules, extension, and cognitive responsibility
    Philosophical Explorations 15 (2). 2012.
    The hypothesis of extended cognition holds that mental states and processes need not be wholly contained within biological confines. Yet the theory is plausible, and informative, only when it can set principled outer limits upon cognitive extension: it should not permit unrestricted expansion of the mental into the material environment. I argue that true cognitive extension occurs only when the subject takes responsibility for the contribution made by a non-neural resource, in a manner that can …Read more
  •  24
    Calvo & Symons, eds. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology
    Theoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 26 (1): 87-90. 2011.
  •  25
    On Being Annoyed
    Ratio 27 (2): 190-204. 2013.
    What is it that unites episodes of the emotion of annoyance? The paper considers possible analyses of the content of the state of annoyance, and concludes that this emotion should be understood to involve a negative construal of an object, event, or state of affairs as having failed to exemplify one of a suite of kinds of everyday quality or excellence. This account permits us to see what is common to a varied range of superficially-disjointed emotional responses, and to make sense of the condit…Read more
  •  63
    Exploring Enactive Realism
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (2): 239-254. 2012.
    Abstract The paper considers the success of enactive realism about perception; the theory that perceivers gain direct access to the mind-independent physical world through their exercise of sensorimotor skills and understanding. I argue that while it is plausible that the possession of some forms of knowledge, conceptual or practical, may enable perceptual contact with the environment, the role of sensorimotor mastery is not as pervasive as the enactive realist proposes. Non-veridical perception…Read more