Craig Delancey

State University of New York at Oswego | SUNY Oswego · Department of Philosophy

There are striking differences between Camus’s early and late philosophical essays, but Camus often claimed that his works were part of one consistent project. This paper argues that, although Camus had a significant change in his views on the consequences of the absurd, throughout his life he also had a common concern with the relation of the absu...

I defend the hypothesis that organisms that produce and recognize meaningful utterances tend to use simpler procedures, and should use the simplest procedures, to produce and recognize those utterances. This should be a basic principle of any naturalist theory of meaning, which must begin with the recognition that the production and understanding o...

This paper defends the hypothesis that phenomenal experiences may be very complex information states. This can explain some of our most perplexing anti-physicalist intuitions about phenomenal experience. The approach is to describe some basic facts about information in such a way as to make clear the essential oversight involved, by way illustratin...

Many scholars claim that a parsimony principle has ontological implications. The most common such claim is that a parsimony principle entails that the “world” is simple. This ontological claim appears to often be coupled with the assumption that a parsimony principle would be corroborated if the “world” were simple. I clarify these claims, describe...

The hypothesis that some moods are emotions has been rejected in philosophy, and is an unpopular alternative in psychology. This is because there is wide agreement that moods have a number of features distinguishing them from emotions. These include: lack of an intentional object and the related notion of lack of a goal; being of long duration; hav...

Consciousness as Complex Event: Towards a New Physicalism provides a new approach to the study of consciousness. The author argues that what makes phenomenal experiences mysterious is that these experiences are extremely complex brain events. The text provides an accessible introduction to descriptive complexity (also known as Kolmogorov Complexity...

Heidegger’s view of attunement, and evolutionary theories of emotion, would appear to be wholly independent accounts of affects. This paper argues that we can understand the phenomenology of attunement and the evolutionary functionalist theory of emotions as distinct perspectives on those same emotions. The reason that the two perspectives are dist...

This paper explores consequences of the claim that phenomenal experiences are physical events of great descriptive complexity. This claim is attractive both because it can explain our most perplexing intuitions about the quality of consciousness and also because it is suggestive of very productive research opportunities. I illustrate the former by...

The superfunctionality claim is that phenomenal experiences are more than functional (objective, causal) relations. This is one of the most widely used but least attacked claims in the anti-physicalist literature on consciousness. Coupled with one form of structuralism, the view that science only explains functional relations, the superfunctionalit...

Many share the conviction that wilderness should play a special role in any environmental ethic, even though the concept of wilderness remains contentious. Ever since it has been recognized that the traditional concept of a wilderness as a region “untrammeled” by human beings has a number of intractable difficulties, there has been no consensus on...

This is a pre-print of an article that appeared in the Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism

Andy Clark’s works set the standard for theoretical cognitive science corroborated by wide-ranging surveys of empirical results. His philosophical claims are always simultaneously provocative and productive: he not only criticizes but always offers new directions for research. Supersizing the Mind is Clark’s most recent book of this kind. Supersizi...

Strong reciprocity and other forms of cooperation with non-kin in large groups and in one-time social interactions is difficult to explain with traditional economic or with simple evolutionary accounts. Reciprocity can be costly, while in many instances earning little or no benefit to the individual or its kin. In Ultimatum Games, for example. huma...

Scientific Naturalism and the Problems of Purposeful ActivityAction and Heidegger's Critique of the Subject/Object DistinctionMerleau-Ponty and a Concrete Being-in-the-WorldAn Opportunity

I defend and revise the systematic account of normative functions (teleofunctions), as recently developed by Gerhard Schlosser and by W. D. Christensen and M. H. Bickhard. This account proposes that teleofunctions are had by structures that play certain kinds of roles in complex systems. This theory is an alternative to the historical etiological a...

Lewis argues convincingly that a DS approach to emotion theory will be fruitful. He also appears to hold that there are DS principles that constitute a theory or are substantial empirical claims. I argue that this latter move is a mistake.

The view that organisms deserve moral respect because they have their own purposes is often grounded in a specification of the biological functions that the organism has. One way to identify such functions, adopted by Gary Varner, is to determine the etiology of some behavior based on the evolution of the structures enabling it. This view suffers f...

Although frequently architecture is criticized in ethical terms, the criteria used in such evaluations are generally indecisive. That is, often a structure is judged in ways about which there can be no consensus. Environmental ethics brings to architecture something unique: ethical design criteria that are decisive because the sought outcomes are i...

Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial intelligence, and other issues. Some theories of mind, of action, and of moral psychology, and some approaches in artificial intelligence, are shown to be inconsistent with ou...

I express two concerns with the theory of emotion that Rolls provides: (1) rewards and punishers alone fail to explain the basic emotions; (2) Rolls needs to clarify his notion of the intentionality of emotions. I also criticize his theory of consciousness, arguing that it fails to explain qualia, and that ironically it is emotions which make this...

I argue that natural realism is the best approach to explaining some emotional actions, and thus is the best candidate to explain the relevant emotions. I take natural realism to be the view that these emotions are motivational states which must be identified by using (not necessarily exclusively) naturalistic discourse which, if not wholly lacking...

Passionate Engines shows that our best understanding of emotion has important implications for understanding intentionality, rationality, phenomenal consciousness, artificial intelligence, and other issues. Some theories of mind, of action, and of moral psychology, and some approaches in artificial intelligence, are shown to be inconsistent with ou...

Certain arguments that phenomenal conscious states play no role, or play a role that could be different, depend upon the seeming plausibility of thought experiments such as the inverted spectrum or phenomenal zombie. These thought experiments are always run for perceptual states like colour vision. Run for affective states like emotions, they becom...