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350Argument and Persuasion in Descartes' MeditationsJournal of the History of Philosophy 49 (4): 497-498. 2011.The central theme of this study is that Descartes is a teacher who develops his arguments for the different philosophical orientations of his students. Indeed, according to Cunning, so respectful is Descartes of their orientations that he actually misrepresents his own view in the Meditations on central doctrinal matters like the basis for dualism. The exegetical argument for this is the central argument of the book, though many other aspects of the Meditations are discussed in novel and interes…Read more
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137Academic Freedom, Feminism and the Probabilistic Conception of EvidencePhilosophy Study 12 (6): 22-28. 2022.There is a current debate about the extent to which Academic Freedom should be permitted in our universities. On the one hand, we have traditionalists who maintain that Academic Freedom should be unrestricted: people who have the appropriate qualifications and accomplishments should be allowed to develop theories about how the world is, or ought to be, as they see fit. On the other hand, we have post-traditional philosophers who argue against this degree of Academic Freedom. I consider a conserv…Read more
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106Our objectives in this paper are, first, to identify several puzzling aspects of the “Trilemma Argument” of Section 6 against the Sense Datum Theory; second, to resolve these puzzles by reconstructing the Trilemma Argument; third to point to a distinction Sellars makes between two versions of the Sense Datum Theory, the “nominalist” version and the “realist” version; fourth, to reconstruct Sellars’s arguments against both; and, finally, to find in an earlier paper, “Is There a Synthetic A Priori…Read more
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94In this paper I explore a version of standard (expected utility) decision theory in which the probability parameter is interpreted as an objective chance believed by agents to obtain and values of this parameter are fixed by indicative conditionals linking possible actions with possible outcomes. After reviewing some recent developments centering on the common-cause counterexamples to the standard approach, I introduce and briefly discuss the key notions in my own approach. (This approach has es…Read more
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83“Contemporary Analytic Philosophy and Bayesian Subjectivism: Why Both are Incoherent”, Philosophy Study, Vol. 6, No. 10 (Oct. 2016): 578-85 (review)Philosophy Study 578-85. 2016.My purpose in this paper is to argue for two separate, but related theses. The first is that contemporary analytic philosophy is incoherent. This is so, I argue, because its methods contain as an essential constituent a conception of intuition that cannot be rendered consistent with a key tenet of analytic philosophy unless we allow a Bayesian-subjectivist epistemology. I argue for this within a discussion of two theories of intuition: a classical account as proposed by Descartes and a modern re…Read more
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82Mind–Body Causation, Mind–Body Union and the ‘Special Mode of Thinking’ in DescartesBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (3). 2008.No abstract
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76Cartesian truthOxford University Press. 1998.This book argues that science and metaphysics are closely and inseparably interwoven in the work of Descartes, such that the metaphysics cannot be understood without the science and vice versa. In order to make his case, Thomas Vinci offers a careful philosophical reconstruction of central parts of Descartes' metaphysics and of his theory of perception, each considered in relation to Descartes' epistemology. Many authors of late have written on the relation between Descartes' metaphysics and his…Read more
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57Raffaella De Rosa's Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory RepresentationAnalytic Philosophy 54 (1): 97-106. 2013.
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50New Essays in Informal Logic Ralph H. Johnson and J. Anthony Blair, editors Windsor, ON: Informal Logic, 1994, x + 164 pp (review)Dialogue 37 (3): 641-. 1998.
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46Aristotle and Modern GeneticsJournal of the History of Ideas 66 (2): 201-221. 2005.We assess Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes in relation to current research on the development of organisms. Our goals are four-fold: first, to present and critically challenge what has become an orthodox interpretation of Aristotle among biologists; second, to present and defend a more adequate account of organismal development; third, to elaborate and justify a novel account of Aristotle's natural teleology, one at odds with the orthodox interpretation; and fourth, to illustrate how our …Read more
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44What is the ground for the principle of the identity of indiscernibles in Leibniz's correspondence with Clarke?Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 95-101. 1974.
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25The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16 (3): 559-574. 1986.
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22On the Truth-Relevancy of the Pragmatic Utility of BeliefsReview of Metaphysics 28 (3). 1975.This position is not confined to the philosophical pragmatists of yore. More recent methodologists of science have reacted to Rudolf Carnap’s thesis that science can dispense with accepting hypotheses as true by maintaining that scientists do accept hypotheses, albeit on practical rather than theoretical grounds. On the position adopted by this school of thought, "accepting a hypothesis as true" is to be reinterpreted to amount to "acting or being disposed to act in the manner which would be bes…Read more
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22Descartes and the Modern (edited book)Cambridge Scholars Press. 2007.Descartes is not simply our iconic modern philosopher, mathematician or scientist. He stands as the cultural symbol for modernity itself. This title offers insights into the relationship between Descartes and the Modern, and the very meaning and status of Modernity itself.
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1512. Braybrooke and the Formal Structure of Moral JustificationIn Susan Sherwin & Peter Schotch (eds.), Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke, University of Toronto Press. pp. 301-322. 2006.
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14Thomas C. Vinci argues that Kant's Deductions demonstrate Kant's idealist doctrines and have the structure of an inference to the best explanation for correlated domains. With the Deduction of the Categories the correlated domains are intellectual conditions and non-geometrical laws of the empirical world. With the Deduction of the Concepts of Space, the correlated domains are the geometry of pure objects of intuition and the geometry of empirical objects.
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14Solving the Triviality Problem in the B-Edition Transcendental DeductionIn Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca & Margit Ruffing (eds.), Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht. Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 471-482. 2013.
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13Contemporary Analytic Philosophy and Bayesian Subjectivism: Why Both Are IncoherentPhilosophy Study 6 (10). 2016.
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13The Missing Argument in Sellars’s Case against Classical Sense Datum Theory in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”Philosophy Study 7 (10). 2017.
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2Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen, Descartes and Method: A Search for a Method in'Meditations' Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 21 (4): 256-258. 2001.
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Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen, eds., New Essays on Kant Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (2): 57-60. 1990.
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Leibniz’s Postulate, Planck’s Postulate, and Divine Reason”, Iyyun The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 68 (January 2020): 57-83 (review)Iyyun, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 68 (January 2020): 57-83. 2020.Leibniz’s Most Determinate Path Principle in Tentamen Anagogicum is an optimization-type law of physics falling into the category of “final cause,” one of “two realms” under discussion there. The other is the “mechanistic/causal.” To be explanatory for Leibniz laws have to be grounded in a causal agency, in the case of the mechanistic realm, the grounding agency is material. I accept, and philosophically defend through a thought experiment, a modern form of this principle, “If a pattern of event…Read more
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Solving the “Contact” Paradox: Rational Belief in the Teeth of the Evidence”, Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, vol. 3 (Jan., 2020): 1 -21 (review)Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 3 (January 2020): 1-21. 2020.Evidentialism is the doctrine that rational belief should be proportioned to one’s evidence. By “one’s evidence,” I mean evidence that we possess and know that we possess. I specifically exclude from “evidence” the following: information of which we are unaware that our brain might rely on in constructing experience or in the formation of beliefs. My initial interest is with the doctrine of Evidentialism as it applies to a quandary that arises in the Sci-Fi movie Contact, the “Contact Paradox” a…Read more
Areas of Specialization
History of Western Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |