•  49
    John Locke
    In Lawrence Nolan (ed.), The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon, Cambridge University Press. pp. 458-460. 2016.
  •  62
    It can seem obvious that we live in a world governed by laws of nature, yet it was not until the seventeenth century that the concept of a law came to the fore. Ever since, it has been attended by controversy: what does it mean to say that Boyle's law governs the expansion of a gas, or that the planets obey the law of gravity? Laws are rules that permit calculations and predictions. What does the universe have to be like, if it is to play by them? This book sorts the most prominent answers into…Read more
  •  197
    Locke on sense perception
    In Jessica Gordon-Roth & Shelley Weinberg (eds.), The Lockean Mind, Routledge. pp. 116-126. 2021.
    Much recent philosophy of perception is preoccupied with finding a place for phenomenal character in a physical world. By contrast, Locke’s philosophy of sensory perception is an episode in his ‘Historical, plain method’ and seeks to map out the processes by which we experience ordinary objects. On Locke’s account, our ideas of primary and secondary qualities enter the mind ‘simple and unmixed’; having an idea of a colour, for example, is not necessary for the visual experience of a shape. An an…Read more
  •  450
    Philosophy of Language
    In Dan Kaufman (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 354-382. 2018.
    How language works — its functions, mechanisms, and limitations — matters to the early moderns as much as it does to contemporary philosophers. Many of the moderns make reflection on language central to their philosophical projects, both as a tool for explaining human cognition and as a weapon to be used against competing views. Even in philosophers for whom language is less central, we can find important connections between their views on language and their other philosophical commitments.
  •  355
    Two kinds of people might find this useful: first, those interested in the modern debate over ideas and representation who don’t happen to read French, or who do, but would like to have in one place the relevant excerpts, to see whether looking at the originals is worth their time. Second are teachers of modern philosophy. The back-and-forth among these figures makes for a refreshing change from the massive, often self-contained works that characterize much of the rest of such a course. For exam…Read more
  •  359
    Locke and the Scholastics on Theological Discourse
    Locke Studies 28 (1): 51-66. 1997.
    On the face of it, Locke rejects the scholastics' main tool for making sense of talk of God, namely, analogy. Instead, Locke claims that we generate an idea of God by 'enlarging' our ideas of some attributes (such as knowledge) with the idea of infinity. Through an analysis of Locke's idea of infinity, I argue that he is in fact not so distant from the scholastics and in particular must rely on analogy of inequality.
  •  229
    Are There Duties to the Dead?
    Philosophy Now 89 14-16. 2012.
    Of course not. In this short paper, I offer a series of arguments against Pitcher and Feinberg and reply to the best objection to the view I defend.
  •  4
    Review of Meaning, Knowledge and Reality, by John McDowell (review)
    Essays in Philosophy 5 (1): 209-211. 2004.
  •  65
    Locke on the role of judgment in perception
    European Journal of Philosophy 28 (3): 670-684. 2020.
    How much is given in perceptual experience, and how much must be constructed? John Locke's answer to this question contains two prima facie incompatible strands. On the one hand, he claims that ideas of primary qualities come to us passively, through multiple senses: the idea of a sphere can be received either by sight or touch. On the other hand, Locke seemingly thinks that a faculty he calls “judgment” is needed to create visual ideas of three‐dimensional shapes. How can these accounts be made…Read more
  •  513
    Berkeley’s Best System: An Alternative Approach to Laws of Nature
    Journal of Modern Philosophy 1 (1): 4. 2019.
    Contemporary Humeans treat laws of nature as statements of exceptionless regularities that function as the axioms of the best deductive system. Such ‘Best System Accounts’ marry realism about laws with a denial of necessary connections among events. I argue that Hume’s predecessor, George Berkeley, offers a more sophisticated conception of laws, equally consistent with the absence of powers or necessary connections among events in the natural world. On this view, laws are not statements of regul…Read more
  •  37
    Dans la Chambre Obscure de l'Esprit: John Locke et l'Invention du Mind by Philippe Hamou (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (2): 347-348. 2019.
    Philippe Hamou claims that Locke played a decisive but underappreciated role in inventing the current notion of mind, and in setting the agenda for contemporary philosophy of mind. These provocative theses, even when qualified as Hamou does, strike me as strained. It is hard, for example, to imagine the convoluted route by which one might identify Locke's secondary qualities with contemporary qualia, as Hamou does ; surely, there must be qualia associated with primary qualities too.However, for …Read more
  •  239
    Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature
    In Walter R. Ott & Lydia Patton (eds.), Laws of Nature, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-17. 2018.
    The conception of a ‘law of nature’ is a human product. It was created to play a role in natural philosophy, in the Cartesian tradition. In light of this, philosophers and scientists must sort out what they mean by a law of nature before evaluating rival theories and approaches. If one’s conception of the laws of nature is yoked to metaphysical notions of truth and explanation, that connection must be made explicit and defended. If, on the other hand, one’s aim is to disentangle laws from truth …Read more
  •  373
    Leges sive natura: Bacon, Spinoza, and a Forgotten Concept of Law
    In Walter Ott & Lydia Patton (eds.), Laws of Nature, Oxford University Press. pp. 62-79. 2018.
    The way of laws is as much a defining feature of the modern period as the way of ideas; but the way of laws is hardly without its forks. Both before and after Descartes, there are philosophers using the concept to carve out a very different position from his, one that is entirely disconnected from God or God’s will. I argue that Francis Bacon and Baruch Spinoza treat laws as dispositions that derive from a thing’s nature. This reading upends the currently orthodox treatment of Spinoza’s laws as …Read more
  •  31
    Representation and Scepticism from Aquinas to Descartes by Han Thomas Adriaenssen (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 56 (4): 752-753. 2018.
    It is by now a truism that early modern debates are heavily indebted to their medieval antecedents. Just in what way, and to what degree, is controversial. Han Thomas Adriaenssen's excellent book follows its topics from the medieval controversy over species through the early moderns. A final part gives an overview of the debates. Throughout, Adriaenssen's work achieves a high level of clarity and insight.The chief subject of controversy is indirect realism, the view that an extra-mental object x…Read more
  •  48
    Laws of Nature (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    What is the origin of the concept of a law of nature? How much does it owe to theology and metaphysics? To what extent do the laws of nature permit contingency? Are there exceptions to the laws of nature? Is it possible to give a reductive analysis of lawhood, or is it a primitive? Twelve brand-new essays by an international team of leading philosophers take up these and other central questions on the laws of nature, whilst also examining some of the most important intuitions and assumptions tha…Read more
  •  389
    The Case Against Powers
    In Stathis Psillos, Benjamin Hill & Henrik Lagerlund (eds.), Causal Powers in Science: Blending Historical and Conceptual Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 149-167. 2021.
    Powers ontologies are currently enjoying a resurgence. This would be dispiriting news for the moderns; in their eyes, to imbue bodies with powers is to slide back into the scholastic slime from which they helped philosophy crawl. I focus on Descartes’s ‘little souls’ argument, which points to a genuine and, I think persisting, defect in powers theories. The problem is that an Aristotelian power is intrinsic to whatever has it. Once this move is accepted, it becomes very hard to see how humble ma…Read more
  •  33
    Berkeley's Principles Expanded and Explained (review)
    Philosophical Review 127 (1): 115-117. 2018.
  •  1
    Empiricism and Meaning in Locke
    Dissertation, University of Virginia. 2000.
    What does Locke mean when he says 'words signify ideas'? What role does this play in his empiricism and in his rejection of Aristotelian doctrines about real essence? ;The dissertation attempts to answer these two main questions. I show that none of the interpretations dominant in the literature provides an adequate understanding of Lockean signification. Rather than sense, reference, or 'making something known,' signification is indication. A sign in this sense is a symptom or a portent. This r…Read more
  •  396
    ‘Archetypes without Patterns’: Locke on Relations and Mixed Modes
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 99 (3): 300-325. 2017.
    John Locke’s claims about relations (such as cause and effect) and mixed modes (such as beauty and murder) have been controversial since the publication of the Essay. His earliest critics read him as a thoroughgoing anti-realist who denies that such things exist. More charitable readers have sought to read Locke’s claims away. Against both, I argue that Locke is making ontological claims, but that his views do not have the absurd consequences his defenders fear. By examining Locke’s texts, as we…Read more
  •  37
    The seventeenth century witnesses the demise of two core doctrines in the theory of perception: naive realism about color, sound, and other sensible qualities and the empirical theory, drawn from Alhacen and Roger Bacon, which underwrote it. This created a problem for seventeenth century philosophers: how is that we use qualities such as color, feel, and sound to locate objects in the world, even though these qualities are not real? Ejecting such sensible qualities from the mind-independent worl…Read more
  •  253
    Leibniz on Sensation and the Limits of Reason
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 33 (2): 135-153. 2016.
    I argue that Leibniz’s doctrine of sensory representation is intended in part to close an explanatory gap in his philosophical system. Unlike the twentieth century explanatory gap, which stretches between neural states on one side and phenomenal character on the other, Leibniz’s gap lies between experiences of secondary qualities like color and taste and the objects that cause them. The problem is that the precise arrangement and distribution of such experiences can never be given a full explana…Read more
  •  70
    What can causal claims mean?
    Philosophia 37 (3): 459-470. 2009.
    How can Hume account for the meaning of causal claims? The causal realist, I argue, is, on Hume's view, saying something nonsensical. I argue that both realist and agnostic interpretations of Hume are inconsistent with his view of language and intentionality. But what then accounts for this illusion of meaning? And even when we use causal terms in accordance with Hume’s definitions, we seem merely to be making disguised self-reports. I argue that Hume’s view is not as implausible as it sounds by…Read more
  •  918
    Phenomenal Intentionality and the Problem of Representation
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (1): 131--145. 2016.
    According to the phenomenal intentionality research program, a state’s intentional content is fixed by its phenomenal character. Defenders of this view have little to say about just how this grounding is accomplished. I argue that without a robust account of representation, the research program promises too little. Unfortunately, most of the well-developed accounts of representation – asymmetric dependence, teleosemantics, and the like – ground representation in external relations such as causat…Read more
  •  74
    Locke and Signification
    Journal of Philosophical Research 27 449-473. 2002.
    This paper addresses the following questions: (a) what did Locke mean when he said that ‘words signify ideas’? and (b) what is Locke’s argument for this thesis, and how successful is it? The paper argues that the two most prominent interpretations, those of Norman Kretzmann and E. J. Ashworth, attribute to Locke an argument for his semantic thesis that is fallacious, and that neither can make good sense of two key passages in book 3 of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. An alternative und…Read more
  •  42
    Berkeley’s Argument for Idealism by Samuel C. Rickless (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (1): 162-163. 2015.
  •  737
    Régis's scholastic mechanism
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39 (1): 2-14. 2008.
    Unlike many of Descartes’s other followers, Pierre-Sylvain Re´gis resists the temptations of occasionalism. By marrying the ontology of mechanism with the causal structure of concurrentism, Re´gis arrives at a novel view that both acknowledges God’s role in natural events and preserves the causal powers of bodies. I set out Re´gis’s position, focusing on his arguments against occasionalism and his responses to Malebranche’s ‘no necessary connection’ and divine concursus arguments.
  •  90
    Locke's Philosophy of Language
    Cambridge University Press. 2003.
    This book examines John Locke's claims about the nature and workings of language. Walter Ott proposes an interpretation of Locke's thesis in which words signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, and argues that rather than employing such notions as sense or reference, Locke relies on an ancient tradition that understands signification as reliable indication. He then uses this interpretation to explain crucial areas of Locke's metaphysics and epistemology, including essence, abstraction, knowledg…Read more
  •  908
    Descartes and Berkeley on mind: The fourth distinction
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (3). 2006.
    The popular Cartesian reading of George Berkeley's philosophy of mind mischaracterizes his views on the relations between substance and essence and between an idea and the act of thought in which it figures. I argue that Berkeley rejects Descartes's tripartite taxonomy of distinctions and makes use of a fourth kind of distinction. In addition to illuminating Berkeley's ontology of mind, this fourth distinction allows us to dissolve an important dilemma raised by Kenneth Winkler.
  •  65
    The New Berkeley
    with Marc Hight
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (1). 2004.
    Throughout his mature writings, Berkeley speaks of minds as substances that underlie or support ideas. After initially flirting with a Humean account, according to which minds are nothing but ‘congeries of Perceptions’, Berkeley went on to claim that a mind is a ‘perceiving, active being … entirely distinct’ from its ideas. Despite his immaterialism, Berkeley retains the traditional category of substance and gives it pride of place in his ontology. Ideas, by contrast, are ‘fleeting and dependent…Read more