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180OmnirationalityRes Philosophica 90 (1): 1-21. 2013.God is omnirational: whenever he does anything, he does it for all and only the unexcluded reasons that favor the action, and he always acts for reasons. Thisdoctrine has two unexpected consequences: it gives an account of why it is that unification is a genuine form of scientific explanation, and it answers the question of when the occurrence of E after a petitionary prayer for E is an answer to the prayer
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103A New Way to Reconcile Creation with Current Biological ScienceProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 85 213-222. 2011.I shall argue that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, current biological science does not rule out the possibility of miraculous intervention in the evolutionary history of human beings. This shows that it is possible to reconcile evolutionary science with the claim that we are designed by God.
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190David Lewis’s Counterfactual Arrow of TimeNoûs 37 (4). 2003.David Lewis (1979) has argued that according to his possible worlds analysis of counterfactuals, “backtracking” counterfactuals of the form “If event A were to happen at tA, then event B would happen at tB” where tB precedes tA, are usually false if B does not actually happen at tB. On the other..
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82I argue that it is possible for a human animal to survive the loss of all bodily parts other than the brain
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149Sincerely Asserting What You Do Not BelieveAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (3). 2012.I offer examples showing that, pace G. E. Moore, it is possible to assert ?Q and I don't believe that Q? sincerely, truly, and without any absurdity. The examples also refute the following principles: (a) justification to assert p entails justification to assert that one believes p (Gareth Evans); (b) the sincerity condition on assertion is that one believes what one says (John Searle); and (c) to assert (to someone) something that one believes to be false is to lie (Don Fallis)
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20Yea, and amen. I am inclined to think everything John said is true, when interpreted appropriately. So what I am going to do is two things. First, I will critically comment on the third of the arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Second, I will give a different argument for the immateriality of the soul that at the same time should somewhat clarify what alternative to dualism and materialism that John and I find plausible.
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35Ultimate ExplanationsContemporary Pragmatism 2 (2): 35-48. 2005.Nicholas Rescher accepts the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In his Nature and Understanding, he gives two candidates for an ultimate explanation: a virtuously circular explanations of facts by laws and laws by facts, and an explanation of the world in terms of optimalism. I argue that the first of these depends on the second, and that the second could be improved by switching to a weaker optimalism or to a theistic explanation
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19          Kant has claimed that lying is always wrong, even in response to a question from a murderer about the whereabouts of his intended victim. Christine Korsgaard has argued that although Kant’s second and third formulations in terms of respect for the humanity in persons and in terms of the Kingdom of Ends of the Categorical Imperative (CI) commit him to this claim, the first formulation in terms of universalizability does..
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388Probability, Regularity, and CardinalityPhilosophy of Science 80 (2): 231-240. 2013.Regularity is the thesis that all contingent propositions should be assigned probabilities strictly between zero and one. I will prove on cardinality grounds that if the domain is large enough, a regular probability assignment is impossible, even if we expand the range of values that probabilities can take, including, for instance, hyperreal values, and significantly weaken the axioms of probability.
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154The ontological argument and the motivational centres of livesReligious Studies 46 (2): 233-249. 2010.Assuming S₅, the main controversial premise in modal ontological arguments is the possibility premise, such as that possibly a maximally great being exists. I shall offer a new way of arguing that the possibility premise is probably true
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20I argue against psychological theories of identity that claim that in cases where one’s personality and memories are moved into the brain of another, we move with them. I am not entirely convinced by my arguments here, I must confess, but I think they deserve some thought.
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60Omniscience, Weak PSR, and MethodPhilo 6 (1): 33-48. 2003.Adhering to the traditional concept of omniscience lands Gale in the incoherence Grim’s Cantorian arguments reveal in talk of “all propositions.” By constructing variants and extensions of Grim’s arguments, I explain why various ways out of the incoherence are unacceptable, why theists would do better to adopt a certain revisionary concept of omniscience, and why the Cantorian troubles are so deep as to be troubles as well for Gale’s Weak PSR. I conclude with some brief reflections on method, su…Read more
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537Being Sure and Being Confident That You Won’t Lose ConfidenceLogos and Episteme 7 (1): 45-54. 2016.There is an important sense in which one can be sure without being certain, i.e., without assigning unit probability. I will offer an explication of this sense of sureness, connecting it with the level of credence that a rational agent would need to have to be confident that she won’t ever lose her confidence. A simple formal result then gives us an explicit formula connecting the threshold α for credence needed for confidence with the threshold needed for being sure: one needs 1−(1−α) to be sur…Read more
