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51Two Notions of Mental RepresentationIn Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, Routledge. 2013.The main thesis of this paper is twofold. In the first half of the paper, (§§1-2), I argue that there are two notions of mental representation, which I call objective and subjective. In the second part (§§3-7), I argue that this casts familiar tracking theories of mental representation as incomplete: while it is clear how they might account for objective representation, they at least require supplementation to account for subjective representation.
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8Two Notions of Mental RepresentationIn Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, Routledge. 2013.The main thesis of this paper is twofold. In the first half of the paper, (§§1-2), I argue that there are two notions of mental representation, which I call objective and subjective. In the second part (§§3-7), I argue that this casts familiar tracking theories of mental representation as incomplete: while it is clear how they might account for objective representation, they at least require supplementation to account for subjective representation.
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12Locke on consciousnessHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 25 (3): 221-242. 2008.Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of present-day Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. We offer an interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. In this paper, it is argued that there are good historical and philosophical reasons to attribute to Locke the view not that conscious states are accompanied by higher-or…Read more
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The same-order monitoring theory of consciousnessIn Uriah Kriegel & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, Mit Press. pp. 143--170. 2006.One of the promising approaches to the problem of consciousness has been the Higher-Order Monitoring Theory of Consciousness. According to the Higher-Order Monitoring Theory, a mental state M of a subject S is conscious iff S has another mental state, M*, such that M* is an appropriate representation of M. Recently, several philosophers have developed a Higher-Order Monitoring theory with a twist. The twist is that M and M* are construed as entertaining some kind of constitutive relation, rather…Read more
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72Event PlenitudeSynthese. forthcoming.One of the salient developments in recent metaphysics is the increasing popularity of material plenitude: roughly, the thesis that wherever there is one material object there is in fact a great multitude of co-located but numerically distinct objects that differ principally in which of their properties they have essentially and which accidentally. Here I argue that we have at least as much reason to look favorably on event plenitude: wherever one event occurs there occur a great multitude of co-…Read more
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209The Limits of Experience: Dogmatism and Moral EpistemologyPhilosophical Issues. forthcoming.Let “phenomenal dogmatism” be the thesis that some experiences provide some beliefs with immediate justification, and do so purely in virtue of their phenomenal character. A basic question-mark looms over phenomenal dogmatism: Why should the fact that a person is visited by some phenomenal feel suggest the likely truth of a belief? In this paper, I press this challenge, arguing that perceptually justified beliefs are justified not purely by perceptual experiences’ phenomenology, but also because…Read more
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2046For-me-ness: What it is and what it is notIn D. Dahlstrom, A. Elpidorou & W. Hopp (eds.), Philosophy of mind and phenomenology, Routledge. pp. 36-53. 2015.The alleged for-me-ness or mineness of conscious experience has been the topic of considerable debate in recent phenomenology and philosophy of mind. By considering a series of objections to the notion of for-me-ness, or to a properly robust construal of it, this paper attempts to clarify to what the notion is committed and to what it is not committed. This exercise results in the emergence of a relatively determinate and textured portrayal of for-me-ness as the authors conceive of it.
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1583Jaspers' Dilemma: The Psychopathological Challenge to Subjectivity Theories of ConsciousnessIn R. Gennaro (ed.), Disturbed Consciousness, Mit Press. pp. 29-54. 2015.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
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410The Sublime of ConsciousnessBritish 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
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310Beatrice Edgell’s Myth of the GivenBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (3): 587-605. 2024.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
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478Knowledge-by-Acquaintance FirstPhilosophy 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.
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Oxford studies in philosophy of mind (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 in this inaugural volume are the value of consciousness, and p…Read more
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10Self-representational Approaches to Consciousness (edited book)Bradford. 2006.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
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749A New Perceptual Theory of IntrospectionIn 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
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La théorie évaluative-attitudinale de la volonté et de l'émotion chez BrentanoIn Natalie Depraz & Maria Gyemant (eds.), Phénoménologie des émotions, Hermann. 2022.
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The perception/cognition divide: One more time, with feelingIn C. Limbeck-Lilienau & F. Stadler (eds.), The philosophy of perception and observation, De Gruynter. 2019.
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71Oxford 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.
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911What 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
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5Personal-Level RepresentationIn Sofia Miguens & Gerhard Preyer (eds.), Consciousness and Subjectivity, Ontos Verlag. pp. 109-146. 2012.
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The same-order monitoring theory of consciousnessIn Josh Weisberg (ed.), Consciousness (Key Concepts in Philosophy), Polity. 2014.
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The same-order monitoring theory of consciousnessIn Josh Weisberg (ed.), Consciousness, Polity. 2014.
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40Oxford 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
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627The Poetic as an Aesthetic CategoryJournal 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
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69Oxford 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.
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546Phenomenal Grounds of Epistemic ValuePhilosophy 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
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54Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 2 (edited book)OUP. 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
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718Imagination, Modal Knowledge, and Modal UnderstandingIn 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
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805The Value of Consciousness to the One Who Has ItIn 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. 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.