•  1464
    According to what we will call subjectivity theories of consciousness, there is a constitutive connection between phenomenal consciousness and subjectivity: there is something it is like for a subject to have mental state M only if M is characterized by a certain mine-ness or for-me-ness. Such theories appear to face certain psychopathological counterexamples: patients appear to report conscious experiences that lack this subjective element. A subsidiary goal of this chapter is to articulate wit…Read more
  •  224
    The Sublime of Consciousness
    British Journal of Aesthetics. forthcoming.
    The aesthetic tradition has identified as paradigmatically sublime such objects as imposing mountains and intense storms, as well as monumental art. But the tradition also acknowledges less paradigmatic cases, including sometimes mathematical structures or abstract concepts. In this paper, we argue that there is also a case for considering phenomenal consciousness – the experiential quality of subjective awareness – as a sublime phenomenon. One appreciates this, we argue, when one is struck by (…Read more
  •  154
    Beatrice Edgell’s Myth of the Given
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Wilfrid Sellars’ “myth of the given” had a momentous influence on 20th-century epistemology, putting under pressure the internalist foundationalism so prominent in early analytic philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the core themes in Sellars’ argument are anticipated in the work of the London philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell (1871-1948). Indeed, in some respects Edgell’s argument against the myth of the given is even more compelling than Sellars’. The paper logically reconstructs…Read more
  •  324
    Knowledge-by-Acquaintance First
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. forthcoming.
    Bertrand Russell’s epistemology had the interesting structural feature that it made propositional knowledge (“S knows that p”) asymmetrically dependent upon what Russell called knowledge by acquaintance. On this view, a subject lacking any knowledge by acquaintance would be unable to know that p for any p. This is something that virtually nobody has defended since Russell, and in this paper I initiate a sympathetic reconsideration.
  • Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Mind (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
  •  62
    Leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousness as an alternative to the two dominant reductive theories of consciousness, the representational theory of consciousness and the higher-order monitoring theory. In this pioneering collection of essays, leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousness, which holds that consciousness always involves some form of self-awareness. The self-representational theory of consciousness stands as an alterna…Read more
  •  597
    A New Perceptual Theory of Introspection
    In Routledge Handbook of Introspection, Routledge. forthcoming.
    According to the perceptual theory of introspection, introspection is a kind of perception of our mental life. To evaluate the perceptual theory’s plausibility, we obviously need to know what entitles a mental phenomenon to the qualification “perceptual.” I start by arguing that this task is complicated by the fact that we really have two notions of the perceptual: a functional notion and a phenomenological notion. The heart of the chapter is an argument that even if we have no reason to think t…Read more
  •  42
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol 4 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2024.
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions.
  •  722
    What is Inner Awareness?
    In Davide Bordini, Arnaud Dewalque & Anna Giustina (eds.), Consciousness and Inner Awareness, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
    According to some views of consciousness, when I experience the taste of mango, I also have an inner awareness of that mango-taste experience. What is this inner awareness? A common way to characterize a mental state type is in terms of its characteristic content and attitude. This is what I propose to do in this paper. I argue (a) that conscious experiences constitute the characteristic content of inner awareness, and (b) that the characteristic attitude of inner awareness is that of representi…Read more
  •  3
    Personal-Level Representation
    In Sofia Miguens & Gerhard Preyer (eds.), Consciousness and Subjectivity, Ontos Verlag. pp. 109-146. 2012.
  •  21
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind vol. 2 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2022.
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions. Each volume will highlight two themes to bring focus to debates. The series will reflect the diversity of methods adopted in contemporary philosophy of mind and provide a venue for rigorous and innovative work by both established and up-and-coming voices in the field. The themes covered in the second volume are doxastic states, the metaphys…Read more
  •  473
    The Poetic as an Aesthetic Category
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 81 (1): 46-56. 2023.
    Poems are not the only things we sometimes call poetic. We experience as poetic also prose passages, as well as films, music, visual art, and even occurrences in daily life. But what is it exactly for something to be poetic in this wider sense? Discussion of the poetic in this sense is virtually nonexistent in the extant analytic literature. The aim of this article is to get a start on trying to come to grips with this phenomenon—the poetic as an aesthetic category that outruns poetry as an art …Read more
  •  59
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2023.
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions.
  •  452
    Phenomenal Grounds of Epistemic Value
    Philosophy Compass 17 (12). 2022.
    Imagine a zombie world that looks “from the outside” just like ours, but where there is no phenomenal consciousness. Creatures that look like us move about just as we do and make the same noises we do, but nobody experiences or feels anything. How much of the epistemic value that’s exemplified in our world survives in that one? The short answer is: any kind of epistemic value that requires the occurrence of consciousness for its exemplification cannot exist in that world, but epistemic value tha…Read more
  •  44
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions. Each volume will highlight two themes to bring focus to debates. The series will reflect the diversity of methods adopted in contemporary philosophy of mind and provide a venue for rigorous and innovative work by both established and up-and-coming voices in the field. The themes covered in the second volume are doxastic states, the metaphys…Read more
  •  549
    Imagination, Modal Knowledge, and Modal Understanding
    In Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran & Christiana Werner (eds.), Imagination and Experience: Philosophical Explorations, Routledge. forthcoming.
    Recent work on the imagination has stressed the epistemic significance of imaginative experiences, notably in justifying modal beliefs. An immediate problem with this is that modal beliefs appear to admit of justification through the mere exercise of rational capacities. For instance, mastery of the concepts of square, circle, and possibility should suffice to form the justified belief that a square circle is not possible, and mastery of the concepts of pig, flying, and possibility should suffic…Read more
  •  694
    The Value of Consciousness to the One Who Has It
    In Geoffrey Lee & Adam Pautz (eds.), The Importance of Being Conscious, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    There is a strong intuition that a zombie’s life is never good or bad for the zombie. This suggests that consciousness has a special role in making life good or bad for the one who lives it. What explains this? In this paper, I consider five possible explanations of the intuition that a zombie’s life is never worth living, plus the option of rejecting the intuition. I point out the considerable costs of each option, though making clear which option strikes me as least problematic.
  •  424
    Egalitarian vs. Elitist Plenitude
    Philosophical Studies 179 (10): 3055-3070. 2022.
    A number of prominent metaphysicians have recently defended the idea of material plenitude: wherever there is one material object, there is in fact a great multitude of them, all coincident and sharing many properties, but differing in which of these properties they have essentially and which accidentally. The main goal of this paper is to put on the agenda an important theoretical decision that plenitudinists face, regarding whether their plenitude is egalitarian or elitist, depending on whethe…Read more
  •  780
    A Fitting-Attitude Approach to Aesthetic Value?
    British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (1): 57-73. 2023.
    It is a noteworthy disanalogy between contemporary ethics and aesthetics that the fitting-attitude account of value, so prominent in contemporary ethics, sees comparatively little play in aesthetics. The aim of this paper is to articulate what a systematic fitting-attitude-style framework for understanding aesthetic value might look like. In the bulk of the paper, I sketch possible fitting-attitude-style accounts of three central aesthetic values – the beautiful, the sublime, and the powerful – …Read more
  •  342
    Mood and Wellbeing
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    The two main subjectivist accounts of wellbeing, hedonism and desire-satisfactionism, focus on pleasure and desire (respectively) as the subjective states relevant to evaluating the goodness of a life. In this paper, I argue that another type of subjective state, mood, is much more central to wellbeing. After a general characterization of some central features of mood (§1), I argue that the folk concept of happiness construes it in terms of preponderance of good mood (§2). I then leverage this c…Read more
  •  711
    If you’re a professional philosopher, you’ve probably heard of Brentano as the thinker who reintroduced the notion of intentionality into modern philosophy. If you’re not a professional philosopher, you’ve probably never heard of him. But Brentano’s philosophical work expands far beyond the theme of intentionality and constitutes in fact a complete philosophical system, with well worked out and strikingly original theories in every major area of philosophy. The purpose of this article is to prov…Read more
  •  822
    The Structure of Phenomenal Justification
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2): 282-297. 2021.
    An increasing number of epistemologists defend the notion that some perceptual experiences can immediately justify some beliefs and do so in virtue of (some of) their phenomenal properties. But this view, which we may call phenomenal dogmatism, is also the target of various objections. Here I want to consider an objection that may be put as follows: what is so special about perceptual phenomenology that only it can immediately justify beliefs, while other kinds of phenomenology—including quite s…Read more
  •  470
    Emotions seem to be epistemically assessable: fear of an onrushing truck is epistemically justified whereas, mutatis mutandis, fear of a peanut rolling on the floor is not. But there is a difficulty in understanding why emotions are epistemically assessable. It is clear why beliefs, for instance, are epistemically assessable: epistemic assessability is, arguably, assessability with respect to likely truth, and belief is by its nature concerned with truth; truth is, we might say, belief’s “formal…Read more
  •  818
    In a series of publications, L. A. Paul has defended a version of the bundle theory according to which material objects are nothing but mereological sums of ‘their’ properties. This ‘mereological’ bundle theory improves in important ways on earlier bundle theories, but here I present a new argument against it. The argument is roughly this: Material objects occupy space; even if properties have spatial characteristics, they do not quite occupy space; on no plausible construal of mereological comp…Read more
  •  730
    Nominalism and Material Plenitude
    Res Philosophica 98 (1): 89-112. 2021.
    The idea of “material plenitude” has been gaining traction in recent discussions of the metaphysics of material objects. My main goal here is to show that this idea may have important dialectical implications for the metaphysics of properties – more specifically, that it provides nominalists with new resources in their attempt to reject an ontology of universals. I will recapitulate one of the main arguments against nominalism – due to David Armstrong – and show how plenitude helps the nominalis…Read more
  •  89
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind presents cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind, combining invited articles and articles selected from submissions. Each volume will highlight two themes to bring focus to debates. The series will reflect the diversity of methods adopted in contemporary philosophy of mind and provide a venue for rigorous and innovative work by both established and up-and-coming voices in the field. The themes in this inaugural volume are the value of consciousness, and p…Read more