Ashley Shaw

From August 2025, I will be Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds. I received my PhD from UCL in 2019.

I work primarily in the Philosophy of Mind and Action. My research is about motivation in rational self-conscious agents. I am interested in desire, rational agency, reasons, and how they are related. I am working on a book on desire. I have also been thinking about need, self-control, self-knowledge of desire and affect. My work engages with other disciplines like linguistics and psychology.

Publications

1. Needs as Causes | ±
   forth. The Philosophical Quarterly.

Facts about need play some role in our causal understanding of the world. We understand, for example, that people have basic needs for food, water and shelter, and that people come to be harmed because their needs go unmet. But what are needs? How do explanations in terms of need fit into our broader causal understanding of the world? This paper provides an account of need attribution, their contribution to causal explanations, and their relation to disposition attribution.

2. Urges | ±
   2024. The Philosophical Review, 133 (2): 151-191.

Experiences of urges, impulses or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This paper develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. I motivate a framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges and exercises of capacities we have to control our urges. I argue that experiences of urges and exercises of control over urges play coordinate roles in providing one with knowledge of one's urges.

3. The Necessity of 'Need' | ±
   2023. Ethics, 133 (3): 329-354.

Many philosophers have suggested that claims of need play a special normative role in ethical thought and talk. But what do such claims mean? What does this special role amount to? Progress on these questions can be made by attending to a puzzle concerning some linguistic differences between two types of ‘need’ sentence: one where ‘need’ occurs as a verb, and where it occurs as a noun. I argue that the resources developed to solve the puzzle advance our understanding of the metaphysics of need, the meaning of ‘need’ sentences, and the function of claims of need in ethical discourse.

4. Focus on Slurs (with Poppy Mankowitz) | ±
   2022. Mind & Language, 1-29.

Slurring expressions display puzzling behaviour when embedded, such as under negation and in attitude and speech reports. On one hand, they frequently appear to retain their characteristic qualities, such as offensiveness and propensity to derogate. On the other hand, it is sometimes possible to understand them as lacking these qualities. A theory of slurring expressions should explain this variability. We develop an explanation that deploys the linguistic notion of focus. Our proposal is that a speaker can conversationally implicate metalinguistic claims about the aptness of a focused slurring expression. The inclusion of a sentential operator in the sentence (e.g., negation) affects the aptness claim conveyed, resulting in the availability of non-pejorative metalinguistic construals (e.g., that the slurring expression is not apt for certain purposes). The resulting explanation of variability relies on independently motivated mechanisms and is compatible with any theory of slurring expressions.

5. Desire and What it's Rational to Do | ±
   2021. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 99 (4): 761-75.

It is often taken for granted that our desires can contribute to what it is rational for us to do. This paper examines an account of desire that promises an explanation of this datum, the guise of the good. I argue that extant guise-of-the-good accounts fail to provide an adequate explanation of how a class of desires—basic desire—contribute to practical rationality. I develop an alternative guise-of-the-good account on which basic desires attune us to our reasons for action in virtue of their biological function. This account emphasises the role of desire as part of our competence to recognise and respond to normative reasons.

6. Do Affective Desires Provide Reasons for Action? | ±
   2021. Ratio, 34 (2): 147-57.

This paper evaluates the claim that some desires provide reasons in virtue of their connection with conscious affective experiences like feelings of attraction or aversion. I clarify the nature of affective desires and several distinct ways in which affective desires might provide reasons. Against recent accounts proposed by Ruth Chang, Declan Smithies and Jeremy Weiss, I motivate doubts that it is the phenomenology of affective experiences that explains their normative or rational significance. I outline an alternative approach that centralises the function of such experiences.

7. Desire and Satisfaction | ±
   2020. The Philosophical Quarterly, 70 (279): 371-384.

Desire satisfaction has not received detailed philosophical examination. Yet intuitive judgments about the satisfaction of desires have been used as data points guiding theories of desire, desire content and the semantics of 'desire'. This paper examines desire satisfaction and the standard propositional view of desire. First, I argue that there are several distinct concepts of satisfaction. Second, I argue that separating them defuses a difficulty for the standard view in accommodating desires that Derek Parfit described as "implicitly conditional on their own persistence", a problem posed by Shieva Kleinschmidt, Kris McDaniel and Ben Bradley. The solution undercuts a key motivation for rejecting the standard view in favour of more radical accounts proposed in the literature.

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