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524Virtues 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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34Reported Miracles: A Critique of HumePhilosophical Review 105 (4): 538. 1996.Joseph Houston’s book is a fine contribution to the philosophical investigation of the value of miracle reports for religious apologetics. It covers a wide range of arguments of interest to philosophers about the concept of miracles and the justifiability of belief in their occurrence, but it is also rich in theological and biblical sources. Houston’s reasoning throughout is careful and subtle, but neither technical nor excessively pedantic. So while the book is primarily intended for scholars, …Read more
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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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44Ethical and Epistemic Egoism and the Ideal of AutonomyEpisteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4 (3): 252-263. 2007.
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408On 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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2834Divine 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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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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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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177Virtue 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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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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338A 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