University of Notre Dame
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1985
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  324
    Bertrand Russell's Defence of the Cosmological Argument
    American Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1): 87-100. 1998.
    According to the cosmological argument, there must be a self-existent being, because, if every being were a dependent being, we would lack an explanation of the fact that there are any dependent beings at all, rather than nothing. This argument faces an important, but little-noticed objection: If self-existent beings may exist, why may not also self-explanatory facts also exist? And if self-explanatory facts may exist, why may not the fact that there are any dependent beings be a self-explana…Read more
  •  26
    Sinnott–Armstrong's Moral Scepticism
    Ratio 16 (1): 63-82. 2003.
    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s recent defence of moral scepticism raises the debate to a new level, but I argue that it is unsatisfactory because of problems with its assumption of global scepticism, with its use of the Sceptical Hypothesis Argument, and with its use of the idea of contrast classes and the correlative distinction between ‘everyday’ justification and ‘philosophical’ justification. I draw on Chisholm’s treatment of the Problem of the Criterion to show that my claim that I know that, e…Read more
  •  90
    Promises and Material Conditionals
    Teaching Philosophy 16 (2): 155-156. 1993.
    Some beginning logic students find it hard to understand why a material conditional is true when its antecedent is false. I draw an analogy between conditional statements and conditional promises (especially between true conditional statements and unbroken conditional promises) that makes this point of logic less counter-intuitive.
  •  155
    Moral realism and program explanation
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (3). 2006.
    Alexander Miller has recently considered an ingenious extension of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit's account of 'program explanation' as a way of defending non-reductive naturalist versions of moral realism against Harman's explanatory criticism. Despite the ingenuity of this extension, Miller concludes that program explanation cannot help such moral realists in their attempt to defend moral properties. Specifically, he argues that such moral program explanations are dispensable from an epistemi…Read more