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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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134Śamkara's principle and two ontomystical argumentsInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 49 (2): 111-120. 2001.
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22The Divine Belief Theory of Truth: Might It Work?In Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), God, Truth, and Other Enigmas, De Gruyter. pp. 141-152. 2015.
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71From restricted to full omniscience: ALEXANDER R. PRUSSReligious Studies 47 (2): 257-264. 2011.Some, notably Peter van Inwagen, in order to avoid problems with free will and omniscience, replace the condition that an omniscient being knows all true propositions with a version of the apparently weaker condition that an omniscient being knows all knowable true propositions. I shall show that the apparently weaker condition, when conjoined with uncontroversial claims and the logical closure of an omniscient being's knowledge, still yields the claim that an omniscient being knows all true pro…Read more
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103The actual and the possibleIn Richard M. Gale (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 317--33. 2002.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Two Interrelated Problems Lewis's Solution Inductive Paradox Identity versus Counterpart Theory Platonism: The Main Realist Alternative to Lewis An Aristotelian Alternative Leibniz's Account A Combined Account.
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11          Despite the fact that the strength of argument is clearly on the pro-life side—nobody except a handful of academics would question the grave wrongness of abortion were pregnancy never inconvenient—somehow ordinary intelligent people, like our students, often remain unconvinced. There are many reasons for this, of course. For instance, a number of students have had their children aborted while many know others who have had abortions, and one does not want to condemn onesel…Read more
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298Not Out of Lust but in Accordance with Truth: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Sexuality and RealityLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6 (4): 51-80. 2003.
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241A gödelian ontological argument improvedReligious Studies 45 (3): 347-353. 2009.Gödel's ontological argument is a formal argument for a being defined in terms of the concept of a positive property. I shall defend several versions of Gödel's argument, using weaker premises than Anderson's (1990) version, and avoiding Oppy's (1996 and 2000) parody refutations
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43Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (review)Review of Metaphysics 55 (4): 873-875. 2002.
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8The production of a number of vaccines involves the use of cell-lines originally derived from fetuses directly aborted in the 1960s and 1970s. Such cell-lines, indeed sometimes the very same ones, are important to on-going research, including at Catholic institutions. The cells currently used are removed by a number of decades and by a significant number of cellular generations from the original cells. Moreover, the original cells extracted from the bodies of the aborted fetuses were transformed…Read more
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9As Mark Murphy has recently shown, standard justifications of universal divine authority are insufficient. [1] By “divine authority” I shall mean the doctrine that obedience is morally owed to God by all. God would not give us a command that we did not have a reason to act in accordance with, Murphy argues, but it does not follow that we would be obliged, much less morally obliged, to have the fact of God’s having commanded the action be among our practical reasons for the action. We might, for …Read more
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104Christian Faith and BeliefFaith and Philosophy 19 (3): 291-303. 2002.Louis Pojman has argued that Christian faith does not entail belief, or even assigning a probability of 1/2 to the claims of Christianity. However, this conclusion fails in many cases because of its ethical consequences. A Christian is committed by his faith to acting in accordance with Christian teaching. However, there are circumstances when it is morally impermissible to act in accordance to beliefs to which one assigns epistemic probability smaller than 1/2, namely when the action is prohibi…Read more
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331The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A ReassessmentCambridge University Press. 2006.The Principle of Sufficient Reason says that all contingent facts must have explanation. In this 2006 volume, which was the first on the topic in the English language in nearly half a century, Alexander Pruss examines the substantive philosophical issues raised by the Principle Reason. Discussing various forms of the PSR and selected historical episodes, from Parmenides, Leibnez, and Hume, Pruss defends the claim that every true contingent proposition must have an explanation against major objec…Read more
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71Independent Tests and the Log‐Likelihood‐Ratio Measure of ConfirmationThought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (2): 124-135. 2014.I shall offer some very plausible assumptions for the measure of confirmation and show that they imply that E confirms H relative to background K to degree f/PK), where f is a strictly increasing function. An additional assumption about how measures of confirmation combine then makes f be proportional to a logarithm
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5I give a simple counterexample to Salmon’s account of causal processes in terms of mark transmission. The example has the advantage that not only does it appear to qualify as transmission of a mark under Salmon’s definition of mark transmission, but it appears to actually be an instance of mark transmission.