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10Virtue Theory and ExemplarsPhilosophical News 4. 2012.This essay outlines an approach to virtue theory that makes the foundation of the theory direct reference to virtuous exemplars, modeled on the famous theory of direct reference, devised in the seventies by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke. The basic idea is that exemplars are persons like that, just as water is liquid like that, and humans are members of the same species as that, and so on. In this theory exemplars are picked out directly through the emotion of admiration rather than through the s…Read more
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45Ethical and Epistemic Egoism and the Ideal of AutonomyEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4 (3): 252-263. 2007.
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410On EpistemologyWadsworth. 2009.These books will prove valuable to philosophy teachers and their students as well as to other readers who share a general interest in philosophy.
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2859Divine Foreknowledge and Human Free WillReligious Studies 21 (3): 279-298. 1985.If God knows everything he must know the future, and if he knows the future he must know the future acts of his creatures. But then his creatures must act as he knows they will act. How then can they be free? This dilemma has a long history in Christian philosophy and is now as hotly disputed as ever. The medieval scholastics were virtually unanimous in claiming both that God is omniscient and that humans have free will, though they disagreed in their accounts of how the two are compatible. With…Read more
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4John Martin Fischer, ed., God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (8): 309-311. 1990.
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16Self-Trust and the Diversity of ReligionsPhilosophic Exchange 36 (1). 2006.The diversity of religions poses two, distinct challenges for belief in a particular religion. The first challenge is based upon an epistemic egalitarianism, according to which all normal human beings are roughly equal in their ability to get knowledge. I argue that this challenge is based on some mistaken assumptions. The second challenge arises from our admiration of people of other faiths. I argue that this second challenge is very serious, since it is rooted in our trust of ourselves.
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Alan G. Padgett, God, Eternity, and the Nature of Time (review)Philosophy in Review 13 179-181. 1993.
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68Perfect Goodness and Divine Motivation TheoryMidwest Studies in Philosophy 21 (1): 296-309. 1997.
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23Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical TheologyPhilosophical Books 36 (1): 74-77. 1995.
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6Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the MindIn Rational Faith: Catholic Responses to Reformed Epistemology, Notre Dame Press. pp. 199-225. 1993.
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88Epistemic Value MonismIn John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa and His Critics, Blackwell. 2004.This chapter contains section titled: The Value Problem Sosa's Solution Epistemically Valuable False Beliefs Organic Unities Gettier.
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37Phronesis and Christian BeliefIn G. Bruntrup & R. K. Tacelli (eds.), The Rationality of Theism, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 177--194. 1999.
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178Virtue in Ethics and EpistemologyProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71 1-17. 1997.
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151Divine Motivation Theory and ExemplarismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (3): 109-121. 2016.In this paper I summarize two versions of a new form of ethical theory in which all basic moral terms are defined by direct reference to exemplars of goodness. I call the Christian form Divine Motivation Theory in a book by the same name (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and the more general form I call Exemplarist Virtue Theory (Gifford Lectures 2015) or Exemplarist Moral Theory (forthcoming 2017, Oxford University Press). In the Christian form the supreme exemplar is God. In exemplarist virt…Read more
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1Confianza epistémica y conflicto epistémico [Epistemic Trust and Epistemic Conflict]Dianoia 54 (62): 27-45. 2009.
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342A Defense of Epistemic AuthorityRes Philosophica 90 (2): 293-306. 2013.In this paper I argue that epistemic authority can be justified in the same way as political authority in the tradition of political liberalism. I propose principles of epistemic authority modeled on the general principles of authority proposed by Joseph Raz. These include the Content-Independence thesis, the Pre-emption thesis, the Dependency thesis, and the Normal Justification thesis. The focus is on the authority of a person’s beliefs, although the principles can be applied to the authority …Read more
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284When philosophers talk about whether it is reasonable to believe in God, they might take the high intellectual approach of presenting one or more of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, all of which have contemporary forms. Or they might take the opposite approach made popular by some Calvinist philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga who argue that a person can be reasonable in believing something without reasons to support it, and belief in God is like that. There are many beliefs for wh…Read more
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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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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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32Religious Diversity and Social ResponsibilityLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4 (1): 135-155. 2001.
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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