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6``Foreknowledge and Human Freedom"In Philip Quinn & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 291-299. 1997.
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1203Obligation, Good Motives, and the Good (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2). 2002.In Finite and Infinite Goods, Robert Adams brings back a strongly Platonistic form of the metaphysics of value. I applaud most of the theory’s main features: the primacy of the good; the idea that the excellent is more central than the desirable, the derivative status of well-being, the transcendence of the good, the idea that excellence is resemblance to God, the importance of such non-moral goods as beauty, the particularity of persons and their ways of imitating God, and the use of direct ref…Read more
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265Intellectual virtue: perspectives from ethics and epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2003.The idea of a virtue has traditionally been important in ethics, but only recently has gained attention as an idea that can explain how we ought to form beliefs as well as how we ought to act. Moral philosophers and epistemologists have different approaches to the idea of intellectual virtue; here, Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski bring work from both fields together for the first time to address all of the important issues. It will be required reading for anyone working on either side of the …Read more
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451"What Is Knowledge?"In John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 92-116. 1999.Knowledge is a highly valued state in which a person is in cognitive contact with reality. It is, therefore, a relation. On one side of the relation is a conscious subject, and on the other side is a portion of reality to which the knower is directly or indirectly related. While directness is a matter of degree, it is convenient to think of knowledge of things as a direct form of knowledge in comparison to which knowledge about things is indirect. The former has often been called knowledge by ac…Read more
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3430Emotion and moral judgmentPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1). 2003.This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a "thick affective concept" A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick…Read more
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32Religious Diversity and Social ResponsibilityLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4 (1): 135-155. 2001.
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928The Rule of St. Benedict and Modern Liberal AuthorityEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (1). 2010.In this paper I examine the sixth century ’Rule of St. Benedict’, and argue that the authority structure of Benedictine communities as described in that document satisfies well-known principles of authority defended by Joseph Raz. This should lead us to doubt the common assumption that premodern models of authority violate the modern ideal of the autonomy of the self. I suggest that what distinguishes modern liberal authority from Benedictine authority is not the principles that justify it, but …Read more
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1008Does libertarian freedom require alternate possibilities?Philosopical Perspectives 14 (s14): 231-248. 2000.
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69A Modern Defense of Religious AuthorityLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 19 (3): 15-28. 2016.
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1John Martin Fischer, ed., God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom (review)Philosophy in Review 10 309-311. 1990.
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1Sleeping beauty and the afterlifeIn Andrew Dole & Andrew Chignell (eds.), God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge University Press. 2005.
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1771The Search for the Source of Epistemic GoodMetaphilosophy 34 (1-2): 12-28. 2003.Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this “the value problem.” I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is that not a…Read more
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3802Exemplarist virtue theoryMetaphilosophy 41 (1-2): 41-57. 1996.Abstract: In this essay I outline a radical kind of virtue theory I call exemplarism, which is foundational in structure but which is grounded in exemplars of moral goodness, direct reference to which anchors all the moral concepts in the theory. I compare several different kinds of moral theory by the way they relate the concepts of the good, a right act, and a virtue. In the theory I propose, these concepts, along with the concepts of a duty and of a good life, are defined by reference to exem…Read more
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27Virtue in Ethics and EpistemologyProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71 1-17. 1997.
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2530Epistemic Authority and Its CriticsEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (4): 169--187. 2014.
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590The Moral Gap (review)Philosophical Review 108 (2): 291-293. 1999.The title of Hare’s book refers to the gap between the demand that morality places on us and our natural capacity to live by it. Such a gap is paradoxical if we accept the “‘ought’ implies ‘can”’ principle. The solution, Hare argues, is that the gap is filled by the Christian God. So we ought to be moral and can do so—with divine assistance. Hare’s statement and defense of the existence of the gap combines a rigorously Kantian notion of the moral demand with a rigorously Calvinist notion of huma…Read more
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84Christian MonotheismFaith and Philosophy 6 (1): 3-18. 1989.In this paper I present an argument that there can be no more than one God in a way which allows me to give the doctrine ofthe Trinity logical priority over the attributes traditionally used in arguments for God’s unicity. The argument that there is at most one God makes no assumptions about the particular attributes included in divinity. It uses only the Identity of Indiscemibles and a Principle of Plenitude. I then offer a theory on the relationship between individuals and kinds which allows m…Read more
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308OmnisubjectivityIn L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 231-248. 2013.
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6Intellectual motivation and the good of truthIn Linda Zagzebski & Michael DePaul (eds.), Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives From Ethics and Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 135--154. 2003.
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10Recent Work on Divine Foreknowledge and Free WillIn Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Oxford University Press. pp. 45-64. 2001.
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259Virtue epistemology: essays on epistemic virtue and responsibility (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2001.Virtue Epistemology is a new movement receiving the bulk of recent attention from top epistemologists and ethicists; this volume reflects the best work in that vein. Included are unpublished articles by such eminent philosophers as Robert Audi, Simon Blackburn, Alvin Goldman, Christopher Hookway, Keith Lehrer, and Ernest Sosa
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705First Person and Third Person Reasons and Religious EpistemologyEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (2). 2011.In this paper I argue that there are two kinds of epistemic reasons. One kind is irreducibly first personal -- what I call deliberative reasons. The other kind is third personal -- what I call theoretical reasons. I argue that attending to this distinction illuminates a host of problems in epistemology in general and in religious epistemology in particular. These problems include (a) the way religious experience operates as a reason for religious belief, (b) how we ought to understand religious …Read more