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46Swinburne's heaven: One hell of a place: Michael LevineReligious Studies 29 (4): 519-531. 1993.Discussions of immortality have tended to focus on the nature of personal identity and, in a related way, the mind/body problem. Who is that is going to survive, and is it possible to survive bodily destruction? There has been far less discussion of what immortality would be like; e.g. the nature of heaven. Richard Swinburne, however, has recently discussed ‘heaven’, and has constructed a novel theodicy fundamentally based on his conception of what heaven is like. I shall criticize both his conc…Read more
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61Racism in Mind: Philosophical Explanations of Racism and Its Implications (edited book)Cornell UP. 2004.Michael P. Levine, Tamas Pataki. the case of racism. If one understands racism to be rooted in some underlying psychological structure, then while what is ordinarily called racist behavior may well be indicative of such an underlying structure, ...
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60Rational Emotion, Emotional Holism, True Love, and Charlie ChaplinJournal of Philosophical Research 24 487-504. 1999.This paper begins with an examination of Amelie Rorty’s claim that although “emotions cannot be rational in the narrow sense of being logically derived from accepted premises, they can be deemed rational... as ‘appropriately formed to serve our thriving.’” This is the background against which (i) I develop a notion of ‘emotional holism’ based on the aetiology of emotion in infantile phantasy; and (ii) introduce a dark corollary about the likelihood that our emotions do not, on the whole, match t…Read more
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42Mackie's Account of Necessity in CausationProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 87. 1987.Michael P. Levine; V*—Mackie's Account of Necessity in Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 87, Issue 1, 1 June 1987, Pages 75–90, https:/
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43Welcome to Su: the spectral universityAngelaki 21 (2): 213-226While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an “uncanny” spectral presence. The encompassing ethico-philosophical question i…Read more
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43Cartesian Materialism and Conservation: Berkelean Immaterialism?Southern Journal of Philosophy 24 (2): 247-259. 1986.
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129Bayesian Analyses of Hume’s Argument Concerning MiraclesPhilosophy and Theology 10 (1): 101-106. 1997.Bayesian analyses are prominent among recent and allegedly novel interpretations of Hume’s argument against the justified belief in miracles. However, since there is no consensus on just what Hume’s argument is any Bayesian analysis will beg crucial issues of interpretation. Apart from independent philosophical arguments—arguments that would undermine the relevance of a Bayesian analysis to the question of the credibility of reports of the miraculous—no such analysis can, in principle, prove tha…Read more
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86Belief in miracles: Tillotson's argument against transubstantiation as a model for Hume (review)International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 23 (3). 1988.HUME THOUGHT THAT WE CANNOT BE JUSTIFIED IN BELIEVING AN EVENT E TO HAVE OCCURRED GIVEN E’S CHARACTERIZATION OF A VIOLATION OF A LAW OF NATURE. HE CLAIMS THAT HE IS USING AN ARGUMENT SIMILAR TO JOHN TILLOTSON’S AGAINST TRANSUBSTANTIATION. A COMPARISON OF HUME’S ARGUMENT WITH TILLOTSON’S CAN HELP IN ANSWERING THE QUESTION OF WHETHER ONE CAN BE JUSTIFIED IN BELIEVING IN A MIRACLE. THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF BOTH TESTIMONY FOR, AND FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE OF, AN ALLEGED MIRACLE IS CONSIDERED. I EXAMINE T…Read more
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23Academic Virtues: Site Specific and Under ThreatJournal of Value Inquiry 50 (4): 753-767. 2016.Extract: Clearly, academic life takes place at the intersection of many social practices. If MacIntyre is right, the role-specific virtues of academic life should be understood in terms of these practices.2 Academic virtues are those excellences required to obtain the internal goods of the social practices constituting academic life. And the social practices of academic life are sustained, competitive and cooperative attempts to achieve a set of academic goals and realize academic forms of excel…Read more
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79Alvin I. Goldman's epistemology and cognition: An introductionPhilosophia 19 (2-3): 209-225. 1989.‘Epistemics: an enterprise linking traditional epistemology, first with cognitive science and, second, with social scientific and humanistic disciplines that explore the interpersonal and cultural processes impinging on knowledge and belief’ (Epistemology and Cognition, p. vii).
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55Violinists Run Amuck in South Dakota: Screen Doors Down in the Badlands!Philosophical Papers 35 (2): 267-281. 2006.Re-Reading: Judith Jarvis Thompson, 'A Defense of Abortion'
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47Believing BadlyPhilosophical Papers 33 (3): 309-328. 2004.This paper explores the grounds upon which moral judgment of a person's beliefs is properly made. The beliefs in question are non-moral beliefs and the objects of moral judgment are individual instances of believing. We argue that instances of believing may be morally wrong on any of three distinct grounds: (i) by constituting a moral hazard, (ii) by being the result of immoral inquiry, or (iii) by arising from vicious inner processes of belief formation. On this way of articulating the basis of…Read more
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20Welcome to Su: the spectral universityAngelaki 21 (2): 213-226. 2016.While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an “uncanny” spectral presence. The encompassing ethico-philosophical question i…Read more
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70“I am not living next door to no zombie”: Posthumans and PrejudiceCritical Philosophy of Race 4 (1): 74-94. 2016.Posthumanist film and television is both a vehicle for reflection on discrimination and prejudice and a means of gratifying in fantasy deeply imbedded human impulses towards prejudice. Discrimination lies at the heart of posthuman narratives whenever the posthuman coalesces around an identifiable group in conflict with humans. We first introduce the idea of prejudice as a form of psychological defense, contrasting it with other accounts of prejudice in the philosophical literature. We then apply…Read more
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75Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching MoviesWiley-Blackwell. 2011.An introduction to philosophy through film, _Thinking Through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies_ combines the exploration of fundamental philosophical issues with the experience of viewing films, and provides an engaging reading experience for undergraduate students, philosophy enthusiasts and film buffs alike. An in-depth yet accessible introduction to the philosophical issues raised by films, film spectatorship and film-making Provides 12 self-contained, close discussions of individual f…Read more
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16Reluctant Heroes and Itchy Capes: The Ineluctable Desire to Be the SaviorJournal of Aesthetic Education 53 (4): 71-85. 2019.In "The Imagination of Disaster," written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America's interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves.1 Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation. Almost all films in the hero genre are also science fiction and are concerned with disasters of one kin…Read more
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278Hope: The Janus-faced virtueEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (3): 11-30. 2019.In this essay we argue for the Janus-faced nature of hope. We show that attempts to sanitise the concept of hope either by separating it conceptually from other phenomena such as wishful thinking, or, more generally, by seeking to minimise the negative aspects of hope, do not help us to understand the nature of hope and its functions as regards religion. Drawing on functional accounts of religion from Clifford Geertz and Tamas Pataki, who both—in their different ways—see the function of religion…Read more
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15Pragmatism Applied: William James and the Challenges of Contemporary Life (edited book)SUNY Press. 2019.William James, one of America’s most original philosophers and psychologists, was concerned above all with the manner in which philosophy might help people to cope with the vicissitudes of daily life. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, James experienced firsthand, much as we do now, the impact upon individuals and communities of rapid changes in extant values, technologies, economic realities, and ways of understanding the world. He presented an enormous range of practical recomme…Read more
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