Joseph
Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Department of Philosophy
4505 Maryland Parkway
Box 455028
Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-5028
office phone: (702) 895-5996
email: oohlah at mac dot com -or- oohlah at unlv dot edu
Wersja polska (przybycie wkrótce)
Greetings and welcome to my corner of the web! I am Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and I am the deputy editor of the Polish Journal of Philosophy. I specialize in action theory (at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics), and much of my research (though not all of it) employs methods commonly associated with the social sciences.
The focus of my research in action theory has been on the problem of act individuation. The problem is primarily concerned with the question: how do we distinguish between actions? Philosophy is not the only discipline concerned with this problem. Psychologists too have investigated similar problems, though they have called it “action parsing” and “action identification.” When action theorists ask such a question, they want to know how any ordinary person would answer it. The problem is understood best through an example. Suppose that Smith moves her hand, pulls the lever, lifts a heavy weight, and scares Jones. Is Smith’s moving her hand the same thing as her scaring Jones? Action theorists, such as, e.g., Donald Davidson, Alvin Goldman, and Judith Jarvis Thomson, have argued for a simple invariant account of act identity. Although each of their views differ in substantive ways, they all contend that their view is consistent with ordinary pretheoretic conceptions of action. What I show through some empirical work -- which is best exemplified by work in “experimental philosophy” -- is that invariant accounts fail to appreciate the complexity and flexibility of ordinary folk intuitions on act individuation. I defend the view that the valence of the consequences of action plays the central theoretical role in people’s views of individuating action, and, hence, the folk account of act individuation. What I hope to accomplish in the not-too-distant future is a monograph on the problem of act individuation, especially its relation to ordinary intuitions and its relevance to issues in applied ethics. Also, I am putting together a proposal for an anthology on the structure and function of thought experiments in philosophy.
Ulatowski
About me...
