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  1. Is Shepherd a Bundle Theorist?David Landy - 2023 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 21 (3):229-253.
    Shepherd appears to endorse something like the following biconditonal regarding qualities and objects. □(An object, O, exists ↔ Some bundle of qualities, Q1, Q2, … Qn exists). There is a growing consensus in the secondary literature that she also takes the right side of this biconditional to ground the left side. I.e. Shepherd is a bundle theorist who takes an object to be nothing but a mass of qualities, or causal powers. I argue here that despite appearances, this interpretation reverses (...)
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  2. (1 other version)A Defense of Shepherd’s Account of Cause and Effect as Synchronous.David Landy - 2020 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 2 (1):1.
    Lady Mary Shepherd holds that the relation of cause and effect consists of the combination of two objects to create a third object. She also holds that this account implies that causes are synchronous with their effects. There is a single instant in which the objects that are causes combine to create the object which is their effect. Hume argues that cause and effect cannot be synchronous because if they were then the entire chain of successive causes and effects would (...)
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  3. Shepherd on Meaning, Reference, and Perception.David Landy - 2022 - Journal of Modern Philosophy 4 (1):12.
    The aim of this paper is to present an interpretation of Shepherd’s account of our most fundamental cognitive powers, most especially the faculty that Shepherd calls perception, which she claims is a unity of contributions from the understanding and the senses. I find that Shepherd is what we would nowadays call a meaning holist: she holds that the meaning of any natural-kind term is constituted by its place in a system of definitions, which system specifies the causal roles of the (...)
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  4. Is Shepherd a Monist?David Landy - 2024 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 22 (1):25-36.
    For Shepherd, how many things exist? On the one hand, it looks like the answer is going to be many. It is a central tent of Shepherd's philosophical system that causation is a relation whereby two or more objects combine to create a third. Since there are many instances of this causal relation, there must be many objects in the world. On the other hand, there are several moments throughout her writing where Shepherd indicates that the distinction between causes and (...)
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  5. Kant’s Better-than-Terrible Argument in the Anticipations of Perception.David Landy - 2020 - Kantian Review 25 (1):77-101.
    Scholars working on Kant’s Anticipations of Perception generally attribute to him an argument that invalidly infers that objects have degrees of intensive magnitude from the premise that sensations do. I argue that this rests on an incorrect disambiguation of Kant’s use of Empfindung as referring to the mental states that are our sensings, rather than the objects that are thereby sensed. Kant’s real argument runs as follows. The difference between a representation of an empty region of space and/or time and (...)
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  6. Shepherd’s Claim that Sensations Are too Fleeting to Stand in Causal Relations with Other Sensations.David Landy - forthcoming - Journal of Scottish Philosophy.
    Shepherd argues that we can know that there exists a universe external to the mind because that universe is the only possible cause of our sensations. As a part of that argument, Shepherd eliminates the possibility that sensations might be caused by other sensations on the grounds that sensations are merely momentary existences and so not capable of standing in causal relations with each other. And yet she claims that sensations do stand in causal relations to other objects, both as (...)
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  7. Shepherd's Accounts of Space and Time.David Landy - forthcoming - Mind.
    There is an apparent tension in Shepherd’s accounts of space and time. Firstly, Shepherd explicitly claims that we know that the space and time of the unperceived world exist because they cause our phenomenal experience of them. Secondly, Shepherd emphasizes that empty space and time do not have the power to effect any change in the world. My proposal is that for Shepherd time has exactly one causal power: to provide for the continued existence of self-same or changing objects. Because (...)
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  8. Sellars' Argument for an Ontology of Absolute Processes.David Landy - 2019 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (1):1-25.
    Scholars have rejected Wilfrid Sellars’ argument for an ontology of absolute processes on the grounds that it relies on a dubious and dogmatic appeal to the homogeneity of color. Borrowing from Rosenthal’s recent defense, but ultimate rejection of homogeneity, I defend this claim of on Sellarsian/Kantian transcendental grounds, and reconstruct the remainder of his argument. I argue that Sellars has good reason to suppose that homogeneity is a necessary condition of any possible experience, including indirect experience of theoretical-explanatory posits, and (...)
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  9. A Rebuttal to a Classic Objection to Kant's Argument in the First Analogy.David Landy - 2014 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 31 (4):331-345.
    Kant’s argument in the First Analogy for the permanence of substance has been cast as consisting of a simple quantifierscope mistake. Kant is portrayed as illicitly moving from a premise such as (1) at all times, there must exist some substance, to a conclusion such as (2) some particular substance must exist at all times. Examples meant to show that Kant makes this mistake feature substances coming into and out of existence, but doing so at overlapping times. I argue that (...)
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  10. Scientific Realism without Rigid Designation in Kant's Analogies.David Landy - 2016 - Kant E-Prints 11 (2):70-89.
    In Kant, Science, and Human Nature, Robert Hanna argues against a version of scientific realism founded on the Kripke/Putnam theory of reference, and defends a Kant-inspired manifest realism in its place. I reject Kriple/Putnam for different reasons than Hanna does, and argue that what should replace it is not manifest realism, but Kant‘s own scientific realism, which rests on a radically different theory of reference. Kant holds that we picture manifest objects by uniting manifolds of sensation using concepts-qua-inferential-rules. When these (...)
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