Professor Neil Levy
Senior Research Fellow
Professor Neil Levy specializes in empirical approaches to ethics and social issues. He has published widely on many topics in philosophy, ranging from philosophy of mind to bioethics. He has published more than 150 articles in refereed journals, and 7 books, including, most recently, Consciousness and Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Journal Articles
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The Surprising Truth About Disagreement
LEVY, NJune 2020|Journal article|Acta Analytica -
Virtue signalling is virtuous
Levy, NApril 2020|Journal article|Synthese -
Rationalization enables cooperation and cultural evolution.
Levy, NApril 2020|Journal article|The Behavioral and brain sciencesCushman argues that the function of rationalization is to attribute mental representations to ourselves, thereby making these representations available for future planning. I argue that such attribution is often not necessary and sometimes maladaptive. I suggest a different explanation of rationalization: making representations available to other agents, to facilitate cooperation, transmission, and the ratchet effect that underlies cumulative cultural evolution.Rationalization, Cultural Evolution -
Belie the belief? Prompts and default states
Levy, NJanuary 2020|Journal article|Religion, Brain and Behavior© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Sometimes agents sincerely profess to believe a claim and yet act inconsistently with it in some contexts. In this paper, I focus on mismatch cases in the domain of religion. I distinguish between two kinds of representations: prompts and default states. Prompts are representations that must be salient to agents in order for them to play their belief-appropriate roles, whereas default states play these roles automatically. The need for access characteristic of prompts is explained by their vehicles: prompts are realized in symbolic systems or even artifacts that make them inapt for automatic regulation of inference and behavior. I argue that some mismatch cases are explained by the fact that agents often report the contents of prompts when they report their beliefs, but behavior is controlled by prompts only when they are made salient to agents. I show that a number of otherwise puzzling findings in the cognitive science of religion, concerning belief intuitiveness, are illuminated by the distinction.
Books and Chapters
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Socializing responsibility
Levy, NApril 2018|Chapter|Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility -
Divine Free Will
Mawson, TJEdited by:Timpe, K, Levy, N, Griffith, MNovember 2016|Chapter|The Routledge Companion to Free Will -
Persistent Vegetative State, Akinetic Mutism and Consciousness
Davies, WH, levy, NEdited by:sinnott-armstrong, WMarch 2016|Chapter|Finding Consciousness: The Neuroscience, Ethics, and Law of Severe Brain Damage -
Naturalism and Free Will
Levy, NFebruary 2016|Chapter|The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism -
Neuroscientific threats to free will
Shepherd, JLEdited by:Timpe, K, Griffiths, M, Levy, NJanuary 2016|Chapter|Routledge Companion to Free Will