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71Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence and the Abundant Life. By Michael Rota (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91 (2): 328-331. 2017.
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3677St. Thomas Aquinas on Intelligent DesignProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 85 79-97. 2011.Recently, the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has challenged the claim of many in the scientific establishment that nature gives no empirical signs of having been deliberately designed. In particular, ID arguments in biology dispute the notion that neo-Darwinian evolution is the only viable scientific explanation of the origin of biological novelty, arguing that there are telltale signs of the activity of intelligence which can be recognized and studied empirically. In recent years, a number of…Read more
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80Paradoxes of Belief and Strategic RationalityCambridge University Press. 1992.This book develops a framework for analysing strategic rationality, a notion central to contemporary game theory, which is the formal study of the interaction of rational agents and which has proved extremely fruitful in economics, political theory and business management. The author argues that a logical paradox lies at the root of a number of persistent puzzles in game theory, in particular those concerning rational agents who seek to establish some kind of reputation. Building on the work of …Read more
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160Dual Agency: A Thomistic Account of Providence and Human FreedomPhilosophia Christi 4 (2): 397-411. 2002.
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171Objects of Intention: A Hylomorphic Critique of the New Natural Law TheoryAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (4): 655-703. 2012.The “New Natural Law” Theory (NNL) of Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Joseph Boyle, and their collaborators offers a distinctive account of intentional action, which underlies a moral theory that aims to justify many aspects of traditional morality and Catholic doctrine. In fact, we show that the NNL is committed to premises that entail the permissibility of many actions that are irreconcilable with traditional morality and Catholic doctrine, such as elective abortions. These consequences follow p…Read more
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1014I wrote the following essay in early 2006 while still a member of the Lutheran Church -- Missouri Synod. On the Vigil of Pentecost in A.D. 2007 (May 25th) I was formally received into the fellowship of the Roman Catholic Church at the parish of St. Louis the King of France in Austin, Texas.
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69The logic of causal explanation an axiomatizationStudia Logica 77 (3). 2004.Three-valued (strong-Kleene) modal logic provides the foundation for a new approach to formalizing causal explanation as a relation between partial situations. The approach makes fine-grained distinctions between aspects of events, even between aspects that are equivalent in classical logic. The framework can accommodate a variety of ontologies concerning the relata of causal explanation. I argue, however, for a tripartite ontology of objects corresponding to sentential nominals: facts, tropes (…Read more
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1233IntroductionIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. 2010.In this introduction, before summarizing the contents of the volume, the authors characterize materialism as it is understood within the philosophy of mind, and they identify three respects in which materialism is on the wane.
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33Epistemological objections to materialismIn Robert C. Koons & George Bealer (eds.), The Waning of Materialism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 281--306. 2009.This chapter argues that materialism is vulnerable to two kinds of epistemological objections: transcendental arguments, that show that materialism is incompatible with the very possibility of knowledge; and defeater arguments, that show that belief in materialism provides an effective defeaters to claims to knowledge. It constructs objections of these two kinds in three areas of epistemology: our knowledge of the laws of nature (and of scientific essences), our knowledge of the ontology of mate…Read more
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Analogues of the Liar Paradox in Systems of Epistemic Logic Representing Meta-Mathematical Reasoning and Strategic Rationality in Non-Cooperative GamesDissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 1987.The ancient puzzle of the Liar was shown by Tarski to be a genuine paradox or antinomy. I show, analogously, that certain puzzles of contemporary game theory are genuinely paradoxical, i.e., certain very plausible principles of rationality, which are in fact presupposed by game theorists, are inconsistent as naively formulated. ;I use Godel theory to construct three versions of this new paradox, in which the role of 'true' in the Liar paradox is played, respectively, by 'provable', 'self-evident…Read more
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274The waning of materialism (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2010.This is a sustained critique of materialism. The contributors offer arguments from conscious experience, rational thought, the interaction of mind and body, and the unity and persisting identity of human persons, and develop a wide range of alternatives.
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213Staunch vs. Faint-hearted Hylomorphism: Toward an Aristotelian Account of CompositionRes Philosophica 91 (2): 151-177. 2014.A staunch hylomorphism involves a commitment to a sparse theory of universals and a sparse theory of composite material objects, as well as to an ontology of fundamental causal powers. Faint-hearted hylomorphism, in contrast, lacks one or more of these elements. On the staunch version of HM, a substantial form is not merely some structural property of a set of elements—it is rather a power conferred on those elements by that structure, a power that is the cause of the generation (by fusion) and …Read more
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29Review of Nicholas Rescher, Presumption and the Practices of Tentative Cognition (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (7). 2007.
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51Doxastic paradoxes without self-referenceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 68 (2). 1990.This Article does not have an abstract
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36Book Review: Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap. The Revision Theory of Truth (review)Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 35 (4): 606-631. 1994.
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191The ontological and epistemological superiority of hylomorphismSynthese 198 (Suppl 3): 885-903. 2017.Materialism—the view that all of reality is wholly determined by the very, very small—and extreme nominalism—the view that properties, kinds, and qualities do not really exist—have been the dominant view in analytic philosophy for the last 100 years or so. Both views, however, have failed to provide adequate accounts for the possibility of intentionality and of knowledge. We must therefore look to alternatives. One well-tested alternative, the hylomorphism of Aristotle and the medieval scholasti…Read more
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23Probability and conditionals, Belief revision and rational decision, edited by Eells Ellery and Skyrms Brian, Cambridge studies in probability, induction, and decision theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, and Oakleigh, Victoria, 1994, viii+ 207 pp (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 62 (1): 330-335. 1997.
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98Faith, Probability and Infinite PassionFaith and Philosophy 10 (2): 145-160. 1993.The logical treatment of the nature of religious belief (here I will concentrate on belief in Christianity) has been distorted by the acceptance of a false dilemma. On the one hand, many (e.g., Braithwaite, Hare) have placed the significance of religious belief entirely outside the realm of intellectual cognition. According to this view, religious statements do not express factual propositions: they are not made true or false by the ways things are. Religious belief consists in a certain attitud…Read more
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56A representational account of mutual beliefSynthese 81 (1). 1989.Although the notion of common or mutual belief plays a crucial role in game theory, economics and social philosophy, no thoroughly representational account of it has yet been developed. In this paper, I propose two desiderata for such an account, namely, that it take into account the possibility of inconsistent data without portraying the human mind as logically and mathematically omniscient. I then propose a definition of mutual belief which meets these criteria. This account takes seriously th…Read more
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12Vann McGee, Truth, Vagueness & Paradox: An Essay on the Logic of Truth Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 12 (2): 118-123. 1992.
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153Teleology as higher-order causation: A situation-theoretic accountMinds and Machines 8 (4): 559-585. 1998.Situation theory, as developed by Barwise and his collaborators, is used to demonstrate the possibility of defining teleology (and related notions, like that of proper or biological function) in terms of higher order causation, along the lines suggested by Taylor and Wright. This definition avoids the excessive narrowness that results from trying to define teleology in terms of evolutionary history or the effects of natural selection. By legitimating the concept of teleology, this definition als…Read more
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172In "The Compatibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism" (Dec. 2003) , Brian Holtz offers two objections to my argument in "The Incompatibility of Naturalism and Scientific Realism" (in Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal , edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Routledge, 2000). His responses are: (1) my argument can be deflected by adopting a pragmatic or empiricist "definition" of "truth", and (2) the extra-spatiotemporal cause of the simplicity of the laws need not be God, or any o…Read more
Austin, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Religion |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |