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525Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of KnowledgeCambridge University Press. 1996.Almost all theories of knowledge and justified belief employ moral concepts and forms of argument borrowed from moral theories, but none of them pay attention to the current renaissance in virtue ethics. This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in epistemology, including the …Read more
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The Dilemma of Freedom and ForeknowledgeInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 34 (2): 118-120. 1993.This original analysis examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will--those arising from Boethius, from Ockham, and from Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and Zagzebski concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal …Read more
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29[Book review] virtues of the mind, an inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of knowledge (review)In Stephen Everson (ed.), Ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 808-810. 1996.
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23Hermes and Athena: Biblical Exegesis and Philosophical TheologyPhilosophical Books 36 (1): 74-77. 1995.
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68Perfect Goodness and Divine Motivation TheoryMidwest Studies in Philosophy 21 (1): 296-309. 1997.
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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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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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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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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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1Confianza epistémica y conflicto epistémico [Epistemic Trust and Epistemic Conflict]Dianoia 54 (62): 27-45. 2009.
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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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339A 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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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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1195Obligation, 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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263Intellectual 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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3424Emotion 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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438"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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1000Does libertarian freedom require alternate possibilities?Philosopical Perspectives 14 (s14): 231-248. 2000.
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920The 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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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.