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4Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion Volume 3: Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2011.Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion is an annual volume offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this longstanding area of philosophy that has seen an explosive growth of interest over the past half century.
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57The Analogy Argument for a Limited Acccount of OmniscienceInternational Philosophical Quarterly 29 (2): 129-138. 1989.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 …Read more
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35How to Be a ReliabilistAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 23 (2). 1986.In recent years, epistemologists have become increasingly impressed with reliabilist theories of justification. 1 Reliabilism is often formulated as the claim that a belief is justified 2 just in case it is a reliable belief; however, this formulation can be somewhat misleading. There is a sense in which a set of beliefs can be reliable, just as a certain history or testimony can be reliable: what one means is that a certain set of propositions is highly accurate, has mostly true members, or is …Read more
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72Zagzebski on Justification (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 191--196. 2000.The heart of the epistemological interest of Zagzebski’s book is found in the tasks of clarifying the natures of justification and knowledge in terms of the intellectual virtues. It is in virtue of undertaking this task that Zagzebski presents a version of virtue epistemology. Though the book has several interesting features apart from this task, I want to argue that in its fundamental tasks, the book is a failure. In particular, I will argue that Zagzebski’s virtue account of justification is i…Read more
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14Review: Zagzebski on Justification (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1). 2000.
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I came to epistemology through an interest in the concept of rationality, and especially through the attacks on the rationality of religious believers. My thoughts at the time focused on the disappointing quality of the arguments for and against religious belief, and I recall being astonished at the time that philosophers capable of such penetrating insight in other areas had nothing that seemed either penetrating or original. The defenders sounded too much like mere apologists for the faith, an…Read more
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87``The Swamping Problem Redux: Pith and Gist"In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 89-112. 2010.
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Unknowable Truths and the Doctrine of OmniscienceJournal of the American Academy of Religion 57 485-507. 1989.THE DOCTRINE OF omniscience has been understood in two ways. Roughly, it has been taken either as the claim that God knows all that is true (Geach, Kvanvig 1986) or as the claim that God knows all that can be known (Swinbume; Mavrodes). The first construal I shall call the traditional construal, and the second I shall call a limited construal. Though the traditional construal would seem to be the natural one to hold, considerations of the analogy between the best construals of the doctrine of om…Read more
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44On Denying a Presupposition of Sellars' Problem:A Defense of PropositionalismVeritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 50 (4): 173-190. 2005.There is a great divide between two approaches to epistemology over the past thirty to forty years. Some label the divide that between internalists and externalists, and that characterization may be accurate on some account of the distinction. I will pursue the divide from a different direction, in part because the literature on the distinction between internalism and externalism has become a mess, and I don’t want to clean up the mess here
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121“He who lapse last lapse best”: Plantinga on leibniz’s lapseSouthwest Philosophy Review 10 (1): 137-146. 1994.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 particu…Read more
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10Review of John Greco (ed.), Ernest Sosa and His Critics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (12). 2004.
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``Epistemic Justification"In Sven Bernecker & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2010.
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2Nozickian Epistemology and the Question of ClosureCroatian Journal of Philosophy 4 (3): 351-364. 2004.Nozick’s contribution to the epistemology of the last half of the twentieth century includes addressing the question of whether knowledge is closed under known implication. I argue that the question of closure provides a serious obstacle to Nozickian approaches to epistemology.
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``Plantinga's Proper Function Theory of Warrant"In Warrant and Contemporary Epistemology, Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 281-306. 1996.
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The four primary epistemic paradoxes are the lottery, preface, knowability, and surprise examination paradoxes. The lottery paradox begins by imagining a fair lottery with a thousand tickets in it. Each ticket is so unlikely to win that we are justified in believing that it will lose.
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80Justification and Proper BasingIn Erik Olsson (ed.), The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer, Kluwer Publishing Co.. pp. 43-62. 2003.
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128Propositionalism and the metaphysics of experiencePhilosophical Issues 17 (1). 2007.The view I've been defending in the theory of justification I have termed ‘propositionalism’. It counsels beginning inquiry into the nature of justification by adopting a particular form of evidentialism, according to which the first task is to describe the abstract relation of evidencing that holds between propositional contents. Such an approach has a variety of implications for the theory of justification itself, and many of the motivations for the view are of a standard internalist variety. …Read more
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60``Coherentism: Misconstrual and Misapprehension"Southwest Philosophy Review 11 (1): 159-169. 1995.Some critics of coherentism have depicted it so that it founders on the distinction between warrant for the content of a belief and warrant for the believing itself. This distinction has to do with the basing relation: one might have warrant for the content of what one believes without basing one's belief properly, without holding the belief because of what warrants it. When the first kind of warrant obtains, I will say that a belief is propositionally warranted.
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89Two approaches to epistemic defeatIn Deane-Peter Baker (ed.), Alvin Plantinga, Cambridge University Press. pp. 107-124. 2007.There are two different kinds of theories of the concept of epistemic defeat. One theory begins with propositional relationships, only by implication describing what happens in the context of a noetic system. Such a theory places inforrmation about defeat up front, not informing us of how the defeat relationships play out in the context of actual belief, at least not initially. The other theory takes a back door to the concept of defeat, assuming a context of actual belief and an entire noetic s…Read more
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97In Defense of CoherentismJournal of Philosophical Research 22 299-306. 1997.Alvin Plantinga and John Pollock both think that coherentism is a mistaken theory of justification, and they do so for different reasons. In spite of these differences, there are remarkable connections between their criticisms. Part of my goal here is to show what these connections are. I will show that Plantinga’s construal of coherentism presupposes Pollock’s arguments against that view, and I will argue that coherentists need not breathe their last in response to the contentions of either. Co…Read more
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1473Coherentism and justified inconsistent beliefs: A solutionSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (1): 21-41. 2012.The most pressing difficulty coherentism faces is, I believe, the problem of justified inconsistent beliefs. In a nutshell, there are cases in which our beliefs appear to be both fully rational and justified, and yet the contents of the beliefs are inconsistent, often knowingly so. This fact contradicts the seemingly obvious idea that a minimal requirement for coherence is logical consistency. Here, I present a solution to one version of this problem.
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271Swain on the basing relationAnalysis 45 (3): 153. 1985.Suppose we want to know whether a person justifiably believes a certain claim. Further, suppose that our interest in this question is because we take such justification to be necessary for knowledge. To justifiably believe a claim requires more than there being a justification for that claim. Presumably, there is a justification for accepting all sorts of scientific theories of which I have no awareness; because of my lack of awareness, I do not justifiably believe those theories. Further, even …Read more
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``Heaven and Hell"In Philip L. Quinn & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 562-568. 1997.
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124The Value of UnderstandingIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 95-112. 2009.
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85What is wrong with minimal foundationalism?Erkenntnis 21 (2): 175-184. 1984.attacks new defenders of foundationalism. Some simply took on the critics, 2 but others attempted to argue that even if the critics were right, only one form of foundationalism was suspect, not foundationalism itself. For, according to these defenders, foundationalism is not to be identified with the view of Classical Foundationalism (CE) that all of our knowledge rests on incorrigible beliefs. Rather foundationalism is the view that all of our knowledge rests on beliefs that are self-warranting…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |