| Will
Nelson
Leonard
The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona Ph.D. student in Philosophy, minor in Cognitive Science The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina B.A. with Highest Honors and Distinction, Philosophy Honors Thesis: Iterated Modals and Metaphysical Nihilism in Lewis's Modal Realism Advisor / Committee: Marc Lange / Ram Neta, John Roberts |
| Papers in progress (email for a copy) |
| Does agentive phenomenology
imply libertarianism? I argue that there is a phenomenology of freedom, that it is both necessary and sufficient for the phenomenology of optionality, and that the satisfaction conditions of the phenomenology of freedom that might carry the weight of libertarianism are those of the phenomenology of optionality. I argue that the satisfaction conditions of the phenomenology of optionality do not include our having libertarian freedom, but do include our having a minimal compatibilist freedom. From this I conclude that the phenomenology of freedom does not imply that we have libertarian freedom, but does imply that we have a minimal compatibilist freedom. |
| The physical-mental gap and the
fact-value gap I argue that it is reasonable to believe that certain phenomenologies contain or instantiate oughts. I demonstrate that if this is the case, then if we bridge the physical-mental gap, then we bridge the fact-value gap. This reveals that the physical-mental gap is more fundamental than the fact-value gap. |
| Against modal concretism I show that, pace Lewis, it would be qualitatively unparsimonious to accept the existence of the plurality of concrete worlds, and more importantly, I show that at best they provide stunted models of philosophical concepts, and not a basis for the reduction of those concepts. Even if the concretist's ontology did exist it wouldn't help us do philosophy, because it wouldn't bear any special relation to philosophical concepts. |
| The binary counterfactual model
of belief Several challenges seem to favor credential models of belief over binary models. Among these challenges are the intuition that we are more confident of some of our beliefs than of others, and at least two epistemic paradoxes: Kripke's paradox and the paradox of the preface. In this paper, I show that the binary model of belief is capable of surmounting these challenges. To do this, I formulate a new binary model of belief, the binary-counterfactual model, which takes account of counterfactual situations in which a binary belief would be changed. I conclude the paper by showing that there is actually reason to prefer this binary-counterfactual model to the credence model, since there is a problem about precision which afflicts the credence model but which does not afflict the binary-counterfactual model. |
| On experience and the theory of
well-being I aim to uncover the character of the true theory of well-being by considering various maneuvers that are available to the theorist who wants to retain a role for experience in the face of challenges to the thesis that experiences have certain kinds of determinate contents. Ultimately, I conclude that these challenges enable us to uncover something of the character of the true theory of well-being by narrowing the class of viable candidates, and I advocate for the particular narrowing that seems to me the most promising. |
|
I also make electronic music |