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122An action theoretic problem for intralevel mental causationPhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 89-105. 2012.I take it that the following is a desideratum of our theories in the philosophy of mind. A theory in the philosophy of mind should help us better understand ourselves as agents and aid in our theorizing about the nature of action and agency. In this paper I discuss a strategy adopted by some defenders of nonreductive physicalism in response to the problem of causal exclusion. The strategy, which I refer to as “intralevelism,” relies on treating mental causation as intra level mental to mental ca…Read more
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109Hobartian Voluntarism and Epistemic DeontologismDisputatio 2 (21). 2006.Mark Heller has recently offered a proposal in defense of a fairly strong version of doxastic voluntarism. Heller looks to the compatibilist theory of free will proposed by R.E. Hobart in the first half of the twentieth century for an account of doxastic control. Heller’s defense of Hobartian Voluntarism is motivated by an appeal to epistemic deontologism. In this paper I argue that Heller’s defense of a version of strong or direct doxastic voluntarism ultimately fails. I finally argue that the …Read more
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104Time, Leeway, and the Laws of Nature: Why Humean Compatibilists Cannot Be EternalistsMetaphysica 20 (1): 51-71. 2019.Humean compatibilism combines a Humean conception of laws of nature with a strong dual-ability condition for free will that requires that agents possess the ability to decide differently when they make a free decision. On the Humean view of laws of nature, laws of nature are taken to be contingent non-governing descriptions of significant regularities that obtain in the entire history of the universe. On Humean compatibilism, agents are taken to possess dual ability when making free decisions be…Read more
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99Strategic Reliabilism and the Replacement Thesis in EpistemologyDialogue 47 (3-4): 425-. 2008.In their recent book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout have challenged Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) in all its guises and have endorsed a version of the "replacement thesis"--proponents of which aim at replacing the standard questions of SAE with psychological questions. In this article I argue that Bishop and Trout offer an incomplete epistemology that, as formulated, cannot address many of the core issues that motivate interest in episte…Read more
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92Divine freedom and creaturely suffering in process theology: A critical appraisalSophia 39 (2): 56-69. 2000.: The suffering of creatures experienced throughout evolutionary history provides some conceptual difficulties for theists who maintain that God is an all-good loving creator who chose to employ the processes associated with evolution to bring about life on this planet. Some theists vexed by this and other problems posed by the interface between religion and science have turned to process theology which provides a picture of a God who is dependent upon creation and unable to unilaterally interve…Read more
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91Causalisms ReconsideredDialogue 43 (1): 147-. 2004.We reply to Andrew Sneddon’s recent criticism of the causal theory of action (CTA) and critically examine Sneddon’s preferred alternative, minimal causalism. We show that Sneddon’s criticism of CTA is problematic in several respects, and therefore his conclusion that “the prospects for CTA look poor” is unjustified. Moreover, we show that the minimal causalism that Sneddon advocates looks rather unpromising and its merits that Sneddon mentions are untenable.
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91Disentangling Dispositions from PowersDialogue 61 (1): 107-121. 2022.Many powers-realists assume that the powers of objects are identical with the dispositions of objects and, hence, that ‘power’ and ‘disposition’ are interchangeable. In this article, I aim to disentangle dispositions from powers with the goal of getting a better sense of how powers and dispositions relate to one another. I present and defend a modest realism about dispositions built upon a standard strong realism about powers. I argue that each correct disposition-ascription we can make of an ob…Read more
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89Pantheism and Saving GodSophia 55 (3): 347-355. 2016.In this paper, I examine Mark Johnston’s panentheistic account of the metaphysics of the divine developed in his recent book, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. On Johnston’s account, God is the ‘Highest One’ and is identified with ‘the outpouring of Being by way of its exemplification in ordinary existents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Being’. Johnston eschews supernaturalism and takes his position to be consistent with what he calls ‘legitimate naturalism’ which he takes to be some …Read more
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81Theistic consubstantialism and omniscienceReligious Studies 54 (2): 233-245. 2018.According to theistic consubstantialism, the universe and God are essentially made of the same stuff. If theistic consubstantialism is correct, then God possesses the essential power to have knowledge de se of the contents of the mind of every conscious being internal to God. If theistic consubstantialism is false, then God lacks this essential property. So either God is essentially corporeal and possesses greater essential epistemic powers than God would have otherwise or God is essentially inc…Read more
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70Unity, ontology, and the divine mindInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85 (3): 319-333. 2019.In his landmark book on philosophical theology, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, Mark Johnston develops a panentheistic metaphysic of the divine that he contends is compatible with ontological naturalism. On his view, God is the universe, but the ‘is’ is the ‘is’ of constitution, not identity. The universe and God are coinciding objects that share properties but have different essential modal properties and, hence, different persistence conditions. In this paper, I address the problem of acc…Read more
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70An Essay on Doxastic AgencyDissertation, University of Rochester. 2005.The problem of doxastic agency concerns what sort of agency humans can exercise with regard to forming doxastic attitudes such as belief. In this essay I defend a version of what James Montmarquet calls "The Asymmetry Thesis": Coming to believe and action are asymmetrical with respect to direct voluntary control. I argue that normal adult human agents cannot exercise direct voluntary control over the acquisition of any of their doxastic attitudes in the same way that they exercise such control o…Read more
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69Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2016.According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.
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64PantheismCambridge University Press. 2022.This Element focuses on some core conceptual and ontological issues related to pantheistic conceptions of God by engaging with recent work in analytic philosophy of religion on this topic. The conceptual and ontological commitments of pantheism are contrasted with those of other conceptions of God. The concept of God assumed by pantheism is clarified and the question about what type of unity the universe must exhibit in order to be identical with God receives the most attention. It is argued tha…Read more
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63Bruno Verbeek (ed.), Reasons and Intentions (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 243 pages. ISBN: 9780754660040 (hbk.). Hardback: £65.00 (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2): 308-310. 2012.
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56Helen Steward , A Metaphysics for Freedom . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 33 (6): 493-495. 2013.
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55Action and Doxastic Control: The Asymmetry Thesis RevisitedEuropean Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4 (1): 5-12. 2008.
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51Guest editorial preface: special issue on pantheism and panentheismInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 85 (1): 1-3. 2019.
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48Maria Alvarez , Kinds of Reasons: An Essay in the Philosophy of Action . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 31 (4): 245-247. 2011.
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48Escapism, religious luck, and divine reasons for action: Andrei A. Buckareff & Allen plugReligious Studies 45 (1): 63-72. 2009.In our paper, ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, we defended a theory of hell that we called ‘escapism’. We argued that, given God's just and loving character, it would be most rational for Him to maintain an open-door policy to those who are in hell, allowing them an unlimited number of chances to be reconciled with God and enjoy communion with Him. In this paper we reply to two recent objections to our original paper. The first is an argument from religious luck offere…Read more
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35New waves in philosophy of action (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2011.Andrei A. Buckareff is Assistant Professor at Marist College, USA --
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29Philosophy of Action: 5 Questions (edited book)Automatic Press/VIP. 2009.Broadly characterized, the philosophy of action encompasses a host of problems about the nature and scope of human action and agency, including, but not limited to, intention and intentional action, the ontology of action, reason-explanations of action, motivation and practical reason, free will and moral responsibility, mental agency, social action, controlling attitudes, akrasia and enkrasia, and many other issues. Philosophy of Action: 5 Questions is a collection of short interviews based on …Read more
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29Guest Editors’ IntroductionEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (2). 2019.no abstract.
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29Can the Agency Theory Be Salvaged?Philosophia Christi 3 (1): 217-224. 2001.Some of the most salient features of Randolph Clarke's causal agent-causal theory of free action are explicated and his theory critiqued. It is shown that invoking agent-causation is unnecessary and makes his theory cumbersome. For insofar as Clarke seeks to render the agency theory more intelligible by appealing to event-causation as contributing to the generation of basic actions, his theory gravitates closer to a causal indeterminist theory of free action.
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21Contra Static DispositionsMetaphysica 22 (2): 285-294. 2021.Work on dispositions focuses chiefly on dispositions that are manifested in dynamic causal processes. Williams, Neil. 2005. “Static and Dynamic Dispositions.” Synthese 146: 303–24 has argued that the focus on dynamic dispositions has been at the expense of a richer ontology of dispositions. He contends that we ought to distinguish between dynamic and static dispositions. The manifestation of a dynamic disposition involves some change in the world. The manifestation of a static disposition does n…Read more
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16Agency, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2015.This collection consists of original contributions that represent the state of the art of philosophical research on agency, free will, and moral responsibility. It should be of interest to both specialists and students with research interests in the philosophy of action and moral psychology.
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13The Constitutive Aim of InquiryPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 27 (2): 319-333. 2023.In recent years, there has been a growing interest in epistemic agency among philosophers. This development is in part owing to a growing interest in mental agency and epistemic normativity, along with associated concepts such as epistemic responsibility and the relationship between epistemic rationality and practical rationality. Most authors have focused solely on our agency exercised in the process of acquiring or forming beliefs in response to reasons. But some have examined temporally exten…Read more
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10Acceptance and Managerial Doxastic AgencyGrazer Philosophische Studien 99 (3): 359-378. 2022.Managerial doxastic agency is one species of indirect doxastic agency. In this article, the author builds on some earlier work and sketches an account of managerial doxastic agency. In particular, he argues that fairly robust doxastic agency can be exercised by performing metamental actions of non-doxastically accepting propositions as true as part of a general strategy involving various means of mental control. That the sort of control counts as a form of internal control and, hence, as a form …Read more
APA Eastern Division
Poughkeepsie, NY, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
PhilPapers Editorships
Action Theory |
Causal Theory of Action |
Pantheism |
Panentheism |