Philosophy research

This is a list of work in philosophy. At the bottom of the page is a list of works currently in progress.

Below are papers that are published or forthcoming--please email me for any drafts or copies of articles that you have trouble accessing!

Edited Volumes

1. Henne, P. and Murray, S. (eds) 2023. Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action (London: Bloomsbury)

Journal Articles

1. Murray, S. 2025. Vigilance and mind wandering. Mind & Language 40:2, 174 - 194.

2. Murray, S. and Nadelhoffer, T. 2024. Commonsense morality and the bearable automaticity of being. Consciousness & Cognition 125, 103748

3. Murray, S. and Nadelhoffer, T. 2024. Not what I expected: Feeling of surprise differentially mediates effect of personal control on attributions of free will and responsibility. Review of Philosophy & Psychology 15, 837 - 61.

4. Murray, S., Dykhuis, E., and Nadelhoffer, T. 2024. Do people understand determinism? The tracking problem for measuring free will beliefs. In J. Knobe and S. Nichols (eds.) Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, vol. 5, 120 - 151.

5. Murray, S. 2024. Negligence and self-trust. In D. Shoemaker (ed.) Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 8, 148 - 172.

6. Murray, S. 2024. The nature and norms of vigilance. American Philosophical Quarterly 61:3, 265 - 278.

7. Murray, S. 2024. Causal power and perfection: Descartes' second a posteriori argument for God's existence. Review of Metaphysics 77:3, 445 - 459.

8. Irving, Z.*, Murray, S.*, Glasser, A., and Krasich, K. 2024. The Catch-22 of Forgetfulness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 102:1, 100 - 18.

9. Nadelhoffer, T., Murray, S., and Dykhuis, E. 2023. Folk intuitions, the free will debate, and the failure to comprehend determinism. Erkenntnis 88:6, 2515 - 36.

10. Bermúdez, J.P.*, Murray, S.*, Barbosa, S., and Chartrand, L. 2023. What's inside is all that counts? The contours of everyday thinking about self-control. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14, 33 - 55.

11. Murray, S. and Krasich, K. 2022. Can the mind wander intentionally? Mind & Language 37:3, 432-43.

12. Murray, S. and Finocchiaro, P. 2021. These confabulations will improve your marriage! Synthese 198, 10313-339.

13. Murray, S., Nadelhoffer, T., and Dykhuis, E. 2021. Piercing the smoke screen: dualism, free will, and Christianity. Journal of Cognition & Culture 21:1-2, 94-111.

14. Murray, S. (2020). A case for conservatism about animal consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 27:9-10, 163-85.

15. Murray, S., (2020). The place of the trace: negligence and responsibility. The Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11, 39-52.

16. Murray, S. and Vargas, M. (2020). Vigilance and control. Philosophical Studies 177, 825-43.

17. Murray, S., Murray, E., Stewart, G., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., and De Brigard, F. (2019). Responsibility for forgetting. Philosophical Studies 176:5, 1177-1201.

18. Murray, S. (2018). Why Value Values?: Comment on John Doris’ Talking to Our Selves. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41, e54.

19. Murray, S. (2017). Reference, Fiction, and Omission. Synthese 195:1, 235-257.

20. Murray, S. (2017). Responsibility and Vigilance. Philosophical Studies 174:2, 507-527.

21. Murray, S. (2016). O’Connor’s Argument for Indeterminism. Philosophical Explorations 19:3, 268-275.

22. Murray, S. (2015). An Early Theory of Contingency in Leibniz. Studia Leibnitiana 47:2, 205-219. 

Book chapters

1. Murray, S. and Henne, P. 2023. Introduction. In Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action

2. Murray, S. 2023. Bringing self-control into the future. In Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action, pp. 51 - 72.

3. Murray, S., Irving, Z.C., and Krasich, K. 2022. The Scientific Study of Passive Thinking: The Methodology of Mind Wandering Research. In F. De Brigard and W. Sinnott-Armstrong (eds.) Neuroscience and Philosophy (MIT Press), 389-426.

4. Murray, S. and De Brigard, F. 2021. “The neurocognitive mechanisms of responsibility: A framework for normatively relevant neuroscience,” In M. Hevia (ed.), Regulating Neuroscience: Translational and Legal Challenges, vol. 4 (Series: Developments in Neuroethics and Bioethics), (Elsevier: Academic Press), 19-40. 

IN PROGRESS:

• Without a trace (Committed to Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol 9): You forgot your anniversary. I argue you are blameworthy because you got lost within your plan. No prior screw-ups required!

• Forgetfulness and responsible agency: When you forget to pick up your kid at soccer practice, the best theory of blame is one where vigilance, not values, does the heavy lifting (and the experimental evidence is on my side).

• What Republicans and Democrats Need to Know about Each Other: Turns out warming partisans up to each other doesn't save democracy. What does is getting them to stop being so wrong about what the other side actually believes.

• Vigilance and the Organization of Attention: Vigilance isn't a kind of attention, it's the upstream manager that bosses attention around (and what fails when you obliviously sail past your highway exit mid-podcast).

• Do Machines Need Self-Control? Machines might actually need self-control. Not because they have desires to wrestle with, but because any system juggling temporally extended plans toward indeterminate goals has to coordinate itself (no soul required).

• Cognitive Control and the Configuration Problem: Philosophers are still treating cognitive control like a fuel tank while cognitive scientists have moved on. I walk through which philosophical theories of effort, willpower, and agency survive the upgrade.

• When Computational Ethics Solves the Wrong Problem: The problem with trolley problems isn't that they're fictional, it's that they're so artificial they don't actually elicit moral cognition at all. This throws a wrench in efforts to build artificial moral systems from trolley data.

• The Ecology of Moral Judgment: Trolley dilemmas are to moral cognition what zoos are to wolves: they strip away everything that makes the system meaningful. This leaves a dilemma (for the moral psychologists): either our paradigms are too artificial to trust or too thin to draw big conclusion.

• The Way of the Wandering Mind: Cognitive scientists keep trying to define mind wandering by what's in your mind; this paper argues they should look at how your mind is moving.

• Schizophrenia, Vigilance, and the Responsibility to Take Responsibility: Develops a vigilance-based account of how schizophrenia compromises temporally extended agency and defends a standing-sensitive, self-trust-grounded form of accountability for the resulting lapses.

• Intellect in the Soul: Aristotle's De Anima 3.5: Defends the traditional interpretation of Aristotle's De Anima 3.5, on which the active intellect is part of the human soul, against recent divine-intellect interpretations.

• Self-Trust as a Unifying Framework for Assessing Neurotechnological Threats to Agency: When a brain implant works so well you can't tell whether your thoughts are your own, the underlying problem is self-trust. This paper argues neurotech policy and informed-consent procedures should be built around problem.

• Still Not Tracking: The Epistemic Gap in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will (with Thomas Nadelhoffer): Bad news for experimental philosophy of free will: there's still no good evidence that participants in your studies actually understand determinism, which means a whole research program is operating on uninterpretable data.

• Excess capacity and shared representation: Insights from computational accounts of cognitive control: Extends Dubova & Sloman's 'excess capacity' framework with a fourth axis (compositional sharing) and argues that good generalization and lousy multitasking are two sides of the same neural coin.

• Theoretical and Practical Auditability in Open-Source Statistical Software: Distinguishes theoretical from practical auditability in open-source statistical software, argues the gap between them is structural rather than contingent, and proposes transparency norms to address it.

• Rational Screening (please email for a draft)

• An atelic account of patience (please email for a draft)

• The metametaphysics of the problem of cognitive ontology (please email for a draft)

• Acting according to plan (please email for a draft)

• Evidential Security and the Norms of Scientific Assertion (please email for a draft)

• Indicator-dependent claims and the norms of presenting statistics (please email for a draft)

BOOK REVIEWS:

1. Murray, S. (2022) Consciousness, Objectivity, and Bias in Comparative Psychology: Review of How to study animal minds by K. Andrews. Metascience 31, 211 - 214.

2. Murray, S. (2020) Review of Emergence: Towards a new metaphysics and philosophy of science by M. Tabaczek. Review of Metaphysics 74:3, 417-19.

3. Murray, S. (2018) Review of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 3, ed. David Shoemaker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Journal of Moral Philosophy 15:5, 611-14.

4. Murray, S. (2018) Review of Consciousness and Freedom: The Inseparability of Thinking and Doing, by Donald Crosby (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). Review of Metaphysics 71:4, 796-98.

5. Murray, S. (2018) Review of Leibniz: Protestant Theologian, by Irena Backus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Journal of Analytic Theology 6.

6. Murray, S. (2016) Review of Omissions: Agency, Metaphysics, and Responsibility by Randolph Clarke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Faith and Philosophy 33:1, 113-18.

7. Murray, S. (2014) Leibniz, God and Necessity by Michael V. Griffin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Theological Studies 75:1, 206-208.