After rejecting Carruthers' conflation of levels of consciousness as implausible and conceptually muddled, and Carruthers' claim that nonhumans are automata as undermined by evolutionary and ethological considerations, we develop a general criticism of contemporary philosophical approaches which, though recognizing nonhuman consciousness, still see animals as mere receptacles of experiences. Th...

The paper inquiries into Brandom’s conception of pragmatistic metaphysics, as outlined at the end of Between Saying and Doing. In the reconstruction proposed, the combination of pragmatism and analytical philosophy that is at the basis of Brandom’s program seems to have many aspects in common with the critical and dialectical conception of metaphysics that we find in Kant and Hegel. My paper is...

Many philosophers have taken there to be an important relation between personal identity and several of our practical concerns (among them moral responsibility, compensation, and self-concern). I articulate four natural methodological assumptions made by those wanting to construct a theory of the relation between identity and practical concerns, and I point out powerful objections to each assum...

Arguments for property dualism offer a strong challenge to materialist views, but even if they are regarded as successful, a large task remains, namely, to develop a positive account of the place of non-physical properties in the world — one that holds some promise of eventual satisfaction regarding the hard problem. After noting some difficulties in current approaches to this task, this paper ...

This paper has to do with the visual perception of actions that are discretely conceptualized. The intent is to develop a vision system that produces causal or intentional descriptions of actions, thus providing the conceptual underpinnings of natural langu age descriptions. The computational theory is developed in linking a "point of action definition" analysis to an analysis of how the physic...

This article considers the question whether belief ascriptions exhibit context dependence. I first distinguish two potential forms of context dependence in belief ascription. Propositional context dependence (PCD) concerns what the subject believes, whereas attitudinal context dependence (ACD) concerns what it is to believe a proposition. I then discuss three potential sources of PCD and two po...

This paper is concerned with the problem of self-identification in the domain of action. We claim that this problem can arise not just for the self as object, but also for the self as subject in the ascription of agency. We discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in self-identification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases. ...

In recent years, even some of its own practitioners have accused analytic philosophy of lacking historical awareness. My aim is to show that analytic philosophy and history are not such a mismatch after all. Against the objection that analytic philosophers have unduly ignored the past I argue that for the most part they only resist strong versions of historicism, and for good reasons. The histo...

I here argue for a particular formulation of truth-deflationism, namely, the propositionally quantified formula, (Q) ”For all p, is true iff p”. The main argument consists of an enumeration of the other (five) possible formulations and criticisms thereof. Notably, Horwich’s Minimal Theory is found objectionable in that it cannot be accepted by finite beings. Other formulations err in not pr...

Unbound anaphoric pronouns or ‘E-type pronouns’ have presented notorious problems for semantic theory, leading to the development of dynamic semantics, where the primary function of a sentence is not considered that of expressing a proposition that may act as the object of propositional attitudes, but rather that of changing the current information state. The older, ‘E-type’ account of unbound ...