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Knowledge, practical interests, and rising tidesIn David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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10What It Takes to Live PhilosophicallyIn James M. Ambury, Tushar Irani & Kathleen Wallace (eds.), Philosophy as a way of life: historical, contemporary, and pedagogical perspectives, Wiley. 2020-10-05.This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay arg…Read more
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IntroductionIn Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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The Ethics of UnderstandingIn Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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714What is philosophy as a way of life? Why philosophy as a way of life?European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 236-251. 2020.Despite a recent surge of interest in philosophy as a way of life, it is not clear what it might mean for philosophy to guide one's life, or how a “philosophical” way of life might differ from a life guided by religion, tradition, or some other source. We argue against John Cooper that spiritual exercises figure crucially in the idea of philosophy as a way of life—not just in the ancient world but also today, at least if the idea is to be viable. In order to make the case we attempt to clarify …Read more
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1044Understanding as an Epistemic GoalDissertation, University of Notre Dame. 2005.Among epistemologists and philosophers of science, one often hears that someone with understanding is able to “see” or “grasp” how the elements of a subject “cohere” or “fit together”—but just what is involved in the seeing or the grasping is usually left to the imagination. I argue that the most productive way to make progress on this issue is by first identifying the kind of explanation-seeking why-questions that drive the search for understanding in the first place. In particular, I suggest…Read more
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1446What It Takes to Live Philosophically: Or, How to Progress in the Art of LivingMetaphilosophy 51 (2-3): 391-410. 2020.This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay arg…Read more
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20Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives From Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (edited book)Oup Usa. 2019.In this volume some of the leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians in the world shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.
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33Does Adversity Make Us Wiser Than Before? Addressing a Foundational Question Through Interdisciplinary EngagementJournal of Value Inquiry 53 (3): 343-348. 2019.
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685Transmitting Understanding and Know-HowIn Stephen Hetherington & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.Among contemporary epistemologists and scholars of ancient philosophy, one often hears that transmitting propositional knowledge by testimony is usually easy and straightforward, but transmitting understanding and know-how by testimony is usually difficult or simply impossible. Further provocative conclusions are then sometimes drawn from these claims: for instance, that know-how and understanding are not types of propositional knowledge. In contrast, I argue that transmitting propositional kn…Read more
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110Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.This collection offers original work on the nature of understanding by a range of distinguished philosophers. Although some of the essays are by scholars well known for their work on understanding, many of the essays bring entirely new figures to the discussion.
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255The goal of explanationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4): 337-344. 2010.I defend the claim that understanding is the goal of explanation against various persistent criticisms, especially the criticism that understanding is not truth-connected in the appropriate way, and hence is a merely psychological state. Part of the reason why understanding has been dismissed as the goal of explanation, I suggest, is because the psychological dimension of the goal of explanation has itself been almost entirely neglected. In turn, the psychological dimension of understanding—the …Read more
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836Understanding as an Intellectual VirtueIn Battaly Heather (ed.), Routledge Companion to Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. 2019.In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up different perspectives and view them with a sympathetic…Read more
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483The Value of ReflectionIn Miguel Ángel Fernández Vargas (ed.), Performance Epistemology: Foundations and Applications, Oxford University Press Uk. 2016.
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308Epistemic Goals and Epistemic ValuesPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (3): 725-744. 2008.No
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981Knowledge, Practical Interests, and Rising TidesIn John Greco & David Henderson (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Point and Purpose in Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2015.Defenders of pragmatic encroachment in epistemology (or what I call practicalism) need to address two main problems. First, the view seems to imply, absurdly, that knowledge can come and go quite easily—in particular, that it might come and go along with our variable practical interests. We can call this the stability problem. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can call this the “whose stakes?” problem. I argue that both probl…Read more
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88Review Essay on Jonathan Kvanvig’s The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 498-514. 2007.
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220Explaining Understanding: New Perspectives From Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (edited book)Routledge. 2016.What does it mean to understand something? What types of understanding can be distinguished? Is understanding always provided by explanations? And how is it related to knowledge? Such questions have attracted considerable interest in epistemology recently. These discussions, however, have not yet engaged insights about explanations and theories developed in philosophy of science. Conversely, philosophers of science have debated the nature of explanations and theories, while dismissing understand…Read more
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167Review essay on Jonathan Kvanvig's the value of knowledge and the pursuit of understandingPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2). 2007.
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1182WisdomAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 1-16. 2015.What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how to live well fails to do justice to the…Read more
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1315On Intellectualism in EpistemologyMind 120 (479): 705-733. 2011.According to ‘orthodox’ epistemology, it has recently been said, whether or not a true belief amounts to knowledge depends exclusively on truth-related factors: for example, on whether the true belief was formed in a reliable way, or was supported by good evidence, and so on. Jason Stanley refers to this as the ‘intellectualist’ component of orthodox epistemology, and Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath describe it as orthodox epistemology’s commitment to a ‘purely epistemic’ account of knowledge —…Read more
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216Explanatory inquiry and the need for explanationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 481-497. 2008.Explanatory inquiry characteristically begins with a certain puzzlement about the world. But why do certain situations elicit our puzzlement while others leave us, in some epistemically relevant sense, cold? Moreover, what exactly is involved in the move from a state of puzzlement to a state where one's puzzlement is satisfied? In this paper I try to answer both of these questions. I also suggest ways in which our account of scientific rationality might benefit from having a better sense of the …Read more
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682Why Study History? On Its Epistemic Benefits and Its Relation to the SciencesPhilosophy 92 (3): 399-420. 2017.I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact that bo…Read more
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549The Value of UnderstandingPhilosophy Compass 7 (2): 103-117. 2012.Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers – including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard – have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to “recover” the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of th…Read more
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172How Understanding People Differs from Understanding the Natural WorldPhilosophical Issues 26 (1): 209-225. 2016.
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144Cardinal Newman, Reformed Epistemologist?American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (4): 497-522. 2001.Despite the recent claims of some prominent Catholic philosophers, I argue that Cardinal Newman's writings are in fact largely compatible with the contemporary movement in the philosophy of religion known as Reformed Epistemology, and in particular with the work of Alvin Plantinga. I first show how the thought of both Newman and Plantinga was molded in response to the "evidentialist" claims of John Locke. I then examine the details of Newman's response, especially as seen in his Essay in Aid of …Read more
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General Philosophy of Science |
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Epistemology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Religion |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
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Wisdom |