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121Philosophy of mind and human natureIn Brian Davies & Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Aquinas, Oxford University Press. 2011.A theory of human nature must consider from the start whether it sees human beings in fundamentally biological terms, as animals like other animals, or else in fundamentally supernatural terms, as creatures of God who are like God in some special way, and so importantly unlike other animals. Many of the perennial philosophical disputes have proved so intractable in part because their adherents divide along these lines. The friends of materialism, seeing human beings as just a particularly comple…Read more
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37A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on OntologyReview of Metaphysics 51 (3): 666-667. 1998.
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9Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Volume 1 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2013.Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy showcases the best new scholarly work on philosophy from the end of antiquity into the Renaissance. OSMP combines historical scholarship with philosophical acuteness, and will be an essential resource for anyone working in the area
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79Veiled DisagreementJournal of Philosophy 111 (11): 608-630. 2014.A theory of how rationally to respond to disagreement requires a clear account of how to measure comparative reliability. Such an account faces a Generality Problem analogous to the well-known problem that besets reliabilist theories of knowledge. But whereas the problem for reliabilism has proved recalcitrant, I show that a solution in the case of disagreement is available. That solution is to measure reliability in the most fine-grained way possible, in light of all the circumstances of the pr…Read more
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138On existing all at onceIn C. Tapp (ed.), God, Eternity, and Time, Ashgate. 2011.It is important to distinguish between two ways in which God might be timelessly eternal: eternality as being wholly outside of time, versus the sort of timelessness that consists in lacking temporal parts, and so existing “all at once.” A prominent but neglected historical tradition, most clearly evident in Anselm, advocates putting God in time, but in an all-at-once sort of way that makes God immune to temporal change. This is an intrinsically plausible conception of divine eternality, which a…Read more
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6The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2010.The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy comprises over fifty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of this period. Starting in the late eighth century, with the renewal of learning some centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, a sequence of chapters takes the reader through developments in many and varied fields, including logic and language, natural philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and theology. Close attention is paid to the context of medieval philosophy, with d…Read more
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9Life’s Form (review)Philosophical Review 111 (2): 308-310. 2002.Perhaps the most lively area of historical research in philosophy today concerns the scholastic antecedents of modern philosophy. As studies of modern philosophy have become more historically rigorous, over the past twenty years, they have become increasingly concerned with understanding the antecedents to figures such as Descartes and Locke. Of course, inasmuch as these authors were notoriously and proudly ignorant of scholastic thought, it is not to be expected that a better understanding of m…Read more
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320Form, substance, and mechanismPhilosophical Review 113 (1): 31-88. 2004.Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents and su…Read more
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9Review of John Cottingham, Peter Hacker (eds.), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (6). 2010.
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Epistemology |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |