Jonathan L. Kvanvig

Alvin Plantinga thinks Leibniz made a mistake. Leibniz claimed that God could have created any possible world, but Plantinga thinks this view amounts to a lapse in judgment on Leibniz =s part. = Plantinga terms this mistake ALeibniz= Lapse,@ and his rejection of this Leibuizian claim plays an important role in Plantinga =s free wili defense against the problem of evil. I will argue that Plantinga fails to show that Leibniz lapsed in thinking about which worlds are actualizable by God; in particular, his argument for this claim is not sound. If I am right, the last lapse is on Plantinga

The flight from foundationalism in the earlier part of this century left several options in its wake. Distress over the possibility of foundationalist replies to the regress problem, coupled with consternation over the thought of circular reasoning mysteriously becoming acceptable as the circle gets large led to the attraction of holistic theories of a coherentist variety. Yet, such coherentisms seemed to leave the belief system cut off from the world, and perhaps a better idea was to abandon the approach to epistemology that centered on the concepts of evidence and justificatory relations and focus instead on connections between our thoughts and the world which they are about, an idea leading to causal and reliability theories.

According to the TDT, no singular propositions about an individual and no "thisnesses" of individuals exist prior to the existence of the indivi­dual in question, where a thisness "is the property of being x, or of being identical with x" and a "singular proposition about an individual x is a proposition that involves or refers to x directly, perhaps by having x or the thisness of x as a constituent, and not merely by way of x's qualitative properties or relations to other individuals" (p. 315) The support for this position comes from two sources, according to Adams.

The Swamping Problem is one of the central problems in the new valuedriven approach to epistemology that has arisen recently. Issues concerning epistemic value, however, are not new. We can find them first in Plato’s dialogue Meno, where Socrates and Meno have a discussion about what type of guide one should prefer if one wants to get to Larissa. The first suggestion is that one should want a guide who knows the way, but Socrates notes that a guide with true opinions will work just as well. Meno’s response to Socrates’ objection raises precisely the correct worries: he wonders about the nature of knowledge (whether it differs from true opinion) and about the value of knowledge (why we prize it over true opinion). The point of view of value-driven epistemology is that a myopic focus on the former question is a mistake and that questions about the value of knowledge and other epistemic phenomena are important in their own right and can help evaluate the adequacy of proposals concerning the nature of knowledge and other epistemic phenomena.

LEMKE has recently taken issue (see ANALYSIS 46.3, June 1986, pp. 138-44) with my claim that no counterfactual causal account of the basing relation is plausible (see ANALYSIS 45.3, June 1985, pp. 153-8). Intuitively, a counterfactual causal account claims that belief is based on evidence if and only if the evidence either causes the belief or would have caused it had the actual cause been absent. This intuitive formulation accounts only for counterfactual causes of level one: events which would have been a cause had only the actual cause been absent. As I argued, there is as much support for allowing counterfactual causes having a higher cardinality: events which would have been a cause had the actual cause and some other counterfactual causes been absent.

Jonathan Kvanvig presents a compelling new work in philosophical theology on the universe, creation, and the afterlife. Organised thematically by the endpoints of time, the volume begins by addressing eschatological matters and the doctrines of heaven and hell and ends with an account of divine deliberation and creation. Kvanvig develops a coherent theistic outlook which reconciles a traditional, high conception of deity, with full providential control over all aspects of creation, with a conception of human beings who are free and morally responsible. The resulting position and defense is labeled "Philosophical Arminianism," and deserves attention in a broad range of religious traditions.

The paradox of ’Buridan’s ass’ involves an animal facing two equally adequate and attractive alternatives, such as would happen were a hungry ass to confront two bales of hay that are equal in all respects relevant to the ass’s hunger. Of course, the ass will eat from one rather than the other, because the alternative is to starve. But why does this eating happen? What reason is operative, and what explanation can be given as to why the ass eats from, say, the left bale rather than the right bale? Why doesn’t the ass remain caught between the options, forever indecisive and starving to death? Religious pluralists face a similar dilemma, a dilemma that I will argue is more difficult to address than the paradox just described

Van Fraassen's epistemology is forged from two commitments, one to a type of Bayesianism and the other to what he terms voluntarism. Van Fraassen holds that if one is going to follow a rule in belief-revision, it must be a Bayesian rule, but that one does not need to follow a rule in order to be rational. It is argued that van Fraassen's arguments for rejecting non-Bayesian rules is unsound, and that his voluntarism is subject to a fatal dilemma arising from the non-monotonic character of reasoning.

Duncan Pritchard’s book (Epistemic Luck, Oxford University Press, 2005) concerns the interplay between two disturbing kinds of epistemic luck, termed “reflective” and “veritic,” and two types of arguments for skepticism, one based on a closure principle for knowledge and the other on an underdetermination thesis about the quality of our evidence for the everyday propositions we believe. Pritchard defends the view that a safety-based account of knowledge can answer the closure argument and provide an account of how veritic epistemic luck is eliminated. He also argues that reflective epistemic luck cannot be eliminated, and that even though it is the sort of luck with which the underdetermination argument is concerned, the fact that this type of luck cannot be eliminated doesn’t undermine knowledge. Instead, it undermines the assertibility of our knowledge, at least in skeptical contexts. So when the skeptic challenges the idea that we know using the underdetermination principle, we have no legitimate response to offer, and it is this fundamental fact of epistemic life that Pritchard terms our inevitable epistemic angst.

IN COMPARISON with other doctrines Cthe doctrine of omnipotence, for example Cthe proper formulation of the doctrine of omniscience has not seemed especially problematic. Once we accept the contemporary wisdom that knowledge is knowledge of truths, the formulation of the traditional doctrine seems straightforward: to be omniscient is just to know all truths. What has seemed problematic, rather, is whether the doctrine is itself true. In particular, many have wondered whether anyone can know the parts of the future not necessitated in any way by the present or past.