Metaphysics
A book blurb for Phenomenalism: A Metaphysics of Chance and Experience.
A 59 second read.
A brief summary of the overall argument of Phenomenalism.
A version of this will appear in an author-meets-critics feature in Philosophia.
Front matter and Chapter 1 of Phenomenalism: A Metaphysics of Chance and Experience (OUP, 2023)
A sneak peak at my latest book. Main thesis: a rock is a tendency for experiences to occur as they do when people perceive a rock, and likewise for all other physical things.
2022. “The case for panpsychism: a critical assessment,” Synthese 200(4), 1-22.
A sympathetic but ultimately negative assessment of the arguments that have been given for the view that physical phenomena are, at bottom, purely experiential phenomena.
2020. “Idealism: putting qualia to work” in Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Uriah Kriegel, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 328-347.
A relatively high-altitude overview of broadly idealist metaphysical theories, summarizing their advantages and disadvantages.
2018. “Defending phenomenalism,” The Philosophical Quarterly 69(276), 574-597.
A defense of Millian phenomenalism against some common and influential objections.
2017. “What is time?” in Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Temporal Experience, Ian Phillips, ed. (Abingdon & New York: Routledge), 227-38.
Explores the prospects for a reductive analysis of time, given the constraint that the terms of a successful analysis must not themselves be temporal.
2016. “Summary of Sensorama: A Phenomenalist Analysis of Spacetime and Its Contents,” Analysis 76(4), 449-53.
A brief synopsis of my first book, for an Analysis book symposium.
2014. “Physical time, phenomenal time, and the symmetry of Nature,” in Debates in the Metaphysics of Time and Related Topics, Nathan Oaklander, ed. (London: Bloomsbury), 131-148.
A discussion of the relationship between time as it pertains to the physical world, and time as a quality of our experience, arguing that the relationship between them is analogous to that between physical color and phenomenal color. Includes some speculation about how to reconcile phenomenal temporality with the (approximate) time-reversal invariance of physical laws.
2010. “Presentism, eternalism, and phenomenal change,” Synthese 176(2), 275-290.
Argues that facts about phenomenal temporality weigh neither for nor against any of the leading metaphysical theories of change.
Philosophy of Mind
2021. “Modal arguments against materialism,” Noûs 55(2), 426-444.
A detailed review of the literature on modal arguments against materialism. I propose a new modal argument to the conclusion that we should not believe that materialism is true. Unlike other modal arguments, this one doesn’t assume that imaginability is a reliable guide to possibility.
2010. “Must an appearance of succession involve a succession of appearances?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 81(1), 49-63.
No.
2009. “Content internalism about indexical thought,” American Philosophical Quarterly 46(2), 95-104.
Defends an internalist position on the content of beliefs typically expressed by words like “I,” “here,” and “now.”
2009. “The knowledge argument, the open question argument, and the moral problem,” Synthese 171(1), 25-45.
A unified response to the knowledge argument against materialism and the open question argument against moral naturalism, with a bonus solution to the so-called moral problem. (Builds on “Enlightening the fully informed.”)
2008. “On an argument for functional invariance,” Minds & Machines 18(3), 373-377.
A discussion of the dancing and fading qualia arguments for non-reductive functionalism.
2008. “Descartes’ dualism and contemporary dualism,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 46(1), 145-160 (co-authored with Cecilia Wee).
Argues that Descartes was a materialist, by present-day standards, inasmuch as he appears to have upheld the metaphysical supervenience of the mental on the physical.
2005. “Enlightening the fully informed,” Philosophical Studies 126(1), 29-56.
Argues that the knowledge argument against materialism is inconclusive, since it could be that Mary learns what it’s like to see red only in the sense that she changes from (a) never having red experience nor relevantly resembling those who have, to (b) having red experience.
——. A note on the knowledge argument.
An unpublished summary of my take on the knowledge argument.
Philosophy of Language
2007. “Forms and objects of thought,” Linguistics & Philosophy 30(1), 97-122.
An account of so-called intensional contexts, like the blank in “John believes that . . . ,” that explains substitution-failure in such contexts as due to indexical changes in the semantic values of the verbs (like “believe”) that generate them. An advantage of this account is that it allows clauses to have the same semantic values inside intensional contexts as they have outside them.
2001. “Names as tokens and names as tools,” Synthese 128(1-2), 133-155.
Further development of some themes from “The indexical character of names.”
2000. “Wittgensteinian semantics,” Noûs 34(4), 483-516.
Argues that family resemblance is best understood as a species of topic-sensitive indexicality.
1998. “The indexical character of names,” Synthese 114(2), 293-317 (co-authored with Joe Rainsbury).
A legacy paper defending a Kripkean theory of naming from some prominent objections. (I have long since come to favor the sort of Russellian descriptivism that Kripke’s theory was meant to supplant.)
Miscellaneous
2004. “Focal complexity in Aristotle and Wittgenstein,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 21(2), 131-150.
Argues that Aristotle’s focal complexity and Wittgenstein’s family resemblance are much the same. (This paper contains some flawed reasoning, but nothing, I think, that affects the main thesis.)
1996. “Kripke’s treatment of Philosophical Investigations §50,” Philosophical Investigations 19(2), 159-163.
A discussion of Kripke’s comments on Wittgenstein’s remarks on the standard meter.
Work in Progress
Argues that there’s an instructive analogy between the A- vs. B-theory debate and debates about the nature of color.
Distinguishes some historically influentual reasons to favor idealism from less well-known but better reasons to favor it.