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81Free Will in Philosophical TheologyBloomsbury Academic. 2013.Natural theology's name can be misleading, for it sounds like what is being done is a kind of theology, not philosophy. But natural theology is better understood to be primarily philosophical rather than theological for it is, most generally, the ...
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163Tracing and the Epistemic Condition on Moral ResponsibilityModern Schoolman 88 (1/2): 5-28. 2011.In “The Trouble with Tracing,” Manuel Vargas argues that tracing-based approaches to moral responsibility are considerably more problematic than previously acknowledged. Vargas argues that many initially plausible tracing-based cases of moral responsibility turn out to be ones in which the epistemic condition for moral responsibility is not satisfied, thus suggesting that contrary to initial appearances the agent isn’t morally responsible for the action in question. In the present paper, I outli…Read more
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22Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2016.This volume presents a systematic exploration of the relationship between religious beliefs and various accounts of free will in the contemporary domain. With a particular eye on how theological commitments might shape our views about the nature of free will, a team of leading experts in the field explores an important gap in the current debate. They focus their attention on this crucial point of intellectual intersection with surprising and illuminating results.
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34Review of Rethinking Responsibility (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (1): 205-206. 2014.No abstract
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93Freedom and the IncarnationPhilosophy Compass 11 (11): 743-756. 2016.In this paper, we explore how free will should be understood within the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, particularly on the assumption of traditional Christology. We focus on two issues: reconciling Christ's free will with the claim that Christ's human will was subjected to the divine will in the Incarnation; and reconciling the claims that Christ was fully human and free with the belief that Christ, since God, could not sin.
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13Review of Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 138-141. 2005.
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33Review of Living with Uncertainty: The Moral Significance of Ignorance (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 9. 2009.
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55Neo-classical TheismIn Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Springer. pp. 195-204. 2013.This is a section introduction which attempts to capture current neo-classical approaches to the nature of God. I begin by introducing the distinction between classical and neo-classical ways of conceiving the divine nature. I then I attempt to rebut a general objection to neo-classical models by drawing a comparison with the development of orthodoxy. I close by introducing the four readings in this section of the volume, and show how they each relate to the larger discussion of neo-classical m…Read more
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126An Argument for LimboThe Journal of Ethics 19 (3-4): 277-292. 2015.In this paper I argue from a number of positions that are, while not uncontested, at least common among analytic philosophers of religion for the possibility, and indeed the plausibility, of a doctrine of limbo. The account of limbo that I advocate is substantially different than the element of Catholic speculative theology that goes by the same name. According to that doctrine, the limbus infantium is a place or state of perfect natural happiness for those who, prior to the age of reason, die w…Read more
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58Disability and the Theodicy of DefeatJournal of Analytic Theology 5 100-120. 2017.Marilyn McCord Adams argues that God’s goodness to individuals requires God to defeat horrendous evils; it is not enough for God to outweigh these evils through compensatory goods. On her view, God defeats the evils experienced by an individual if and only if God’s goodness to the individual enables her to integrate the evil organically into a unified life story she perceives as good and meaningful. In this essay, we seek to apply Adams’s theodicy of defeat to a particular form of suffering. We …Read more
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96The Dialectic Role of the Flickers of FreedomPhilosophical Studies 131 (2): 337-368. 2006.One well-known incompatibilist response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples is the ‘flicker-of-freedom strategy’. The flicker strategy claims that even in a Frankfurt-style counterexample, there are still morally relevant alternative possibilities. In the present paper, I differentiate between two distinct understandings of the flicker strategy, as the failure to differentiate these two versions has led some philosophers to argue at cross-purposes. I also explore the respective dialectic roles th…Read more
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72On Analytic TheologyScientia et Fides 3 (2): 1-13. 2015.My primary aims in this paper are to give an overview of a recent movement which goes by the name of ‘analytic theology’, to locate that movement within the larger context of contemporary philosophy of religion, and to identify some of the weakness or objections that analytic theology will need to address moving forward. While I think that some of these objections have merit, I also think that the promise of analytic theology’s contribution to theology more broadly is, in my view, sufficiently r…Read more
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22Free will: sourcehood and its alternativesContinuum. 2012.An important and engaging book on a key argument in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility.
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157Causal History Matters, but Not for IndividuationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1): 77-91. 2009.In ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,’ Harry Frankfurt introduces a scenario aimed at showing that the having of alternative possibilities is not required for moral responsibility. According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), an agent is morally responsible for her action only if she could have done otherwise; Frankfurt thinks his scenario shows that PAP is, in fact, false. Frankfurt thinks that the denial of PAP gives credence to compatibilism, the thesis that …Read more
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784Heavenly Freedom: A Response to CowanFaith and Philosophy 30 (2): 188-197. 2013.In a recent issue of Faith and Philosophy, Steven Cowan calls into question our success in responding to what we called the “Problem of Heavenly Free- dom” in our earlier “Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will in Heaven.” In this reply, we defend our view against Cowan’s criticisms.
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148Source incompatibilism and its alternativesAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2): 143-155. 2007.In current debates about moral responsibility, it is common to differentiate two fundamentally different incompatibilist positions: Leeway Incompatibilism and Source Incompatibilism. The present paper argues that this is a bad dichotomy. Those forms of Leeway Incompatibilism that have no appeal to ‘origination’ or ‘ultimacy’ are problematic, which suggests that incompatibilists should prefer Source Incompatibilism. Two sub-classifications of Source Incompatibilism are then differentiated: Narrow…Read more
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