Philosophy (Scholarly Publications)
Recent Submissions
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Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 2: Margaret Cavendish and Berkeley's Attitudes Towards Women
(2023)In Part 1, we explored how Berkeley drew from Homeric literature and used literary techniques such as satire to challenge his “freethinking” philosophical opponents in “The Pineal Gland” story published in The Guardian in ... -
Berkeley's Gland Tour into Speculative Fiction Part 1: Homer, Descartes and Pope
(2023)Berkeley is best known for his immaterialism and the texts that extol it—the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. He made his case by treatise, then by dialogue, and this tendency ... -
Self-Ownership and the Duty to Assist
(2022)Libertarians are attracted to the self-ownership thesis because it seems to satisfy four important theoretical desiderata. First, the thesis treats all persons equally by assigning them the same initial set of rights. ... -
How to Explain the Direction of Time
(2022)Reichenbach explains temporally asymmetric phenomena by appeal to entropy and ‘branch structure’. He explains why the entropic gradients of isolated subsystems are oriented towards the future and not the past, and why we ... -
Ructions over Fluxions
(2022)Following the publication of Berkeley's caustic critique of calculus, The Analyst (1734), numerous figures in the scientific world responded to the text's allegations of rigour violations and a culture of mathematics-laced ... -
Freedom's Values: the Good and the Right
(2022)How is freedom valuable? And how should we go about defining freedom? In this essay, I discuss a distinction between two general ways of valuing freedom: one appeals to the good (e.g., to freedom's contribution to well-being); ... -
Review of: Billy Christmas: Property and Justice. A Liberal Theory of Natural Rights. New York: Routledge, 2021
(2022)In this book Billy Christmas advances an interpretation of justice grounded in a distinctive theory of property. Christmas’ account of property is at the same time pluralistic – it justifies various forms of property of ... -
"Tint and Form": The Geometric Philosophy Underlying Oliver Byrne's Elements
(2022)Oliver Byrne published his ground-breaking and visually remarkable edition of Euclid’s Elements in 1847. The book is extraordinary: its pages are adorned with generous four-colour diagrams, illustrations and grids, and ... -
What message are we sending bottle-feeding families when we place formula in the same retail category as cigarettes?
(Image Magazine, 2021)I have a powerful memory of first reflecting on Irish breastfeeding politics. I was 20 and visiting a then- new American coffee chain that had arrived on my local main street. Amid trying to figure out which series of ... -
Reciprocal Libertarianism
(2022)Reciprocal libertarianism is a version of left-wing libertarianism that combines self-ownership with an egalitarian distribution of resources according to reciprocity. In this paper I show that reciprocal libertarianism ... -
Moralised Definitions of Freedom, Autonomy, and the Personal Value of Opportunities to Perform Morally Impermissible Actions
(2021)Are the opportunities to perform morally impermissible actions valuable? And, if so, has their value any role to play in normative arguments? In this essay I examine the personal value of opportunities to perform morally ... -
Shameless luck egalitarians
(2022)A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ ... -
Explanation, Justification, and Egalitarianism
(2021)This paper argues that the philosophy of explanation can help inform core debates in value theory. Specifically, it argues that there is a consistent parallelism between the properties of explanation and the properties of ... -
Luck Egalitarianism Without Moral Tyranny
(2022)Luck egalitarians contend that, while each person starts out with a claim to an equal quantity of advantage, she can forfeit this claim by making certain choices. The appeal of luck egalitarianism is that it seems to satisfy ... -
Back to the Present: How Not to Use Counterfactuals to Explain Causal Asymmetry
(2022)A plausible thought is that we should evaluate counterfactuals in the actual world by holding the present ‘fixed’; the state of the counterfactual world at the time of the antecedent, outside the area of the antecedent, ... -
Libertatea de exprimare si deplatformarea (Freedom of expression and deplatforming)
(Polirom, 2021)Some complain that either the right to freedom of speech or expression or people’s freedom is being restricted in recent times by calls for no platforming certain individuals. This paper aims to argue that such complaints ... -
Naturalism, Functionalism and Chance: Not a Best Fit for the Humean
(Oxford University Press, 2023)How should we give accounts of scientific modal relations, such as laws and chances? According the Humean, we should do so by reducing these relations to parts of non-modal actuality: typically, patterns in actual events, ... -
Foundational Grounding and Creaturely Freedom
(2021)The argument from contingency for the existence of God is best understood as a request for an explanation of the total sequence of causes and effects in the universe (‘History’ for short). Many puzzles about how there could ... -
Astell and Masham on Epistemic Authority and Women's Individual Judgment in Religion
(Oxford University Press, 2022)In 1705, Mary Astell and Damaris Masham both published works advocating for women’s use of individual judgment in matters of religion. Although both philosophers advocate for women’s education and intellectual autonomy, ...