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548Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious DisagreementLexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield. 2019.To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a…Read more
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32Book Reviews Robert C. Roberts, and W. Jay Wood. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. viii+329, $99.00 (review)Ethics 119 (2): 377-382. 2009.This book is a major contribution to a growing literature in character-based or responsibilist epistemology. One point I criticize is the author's claim that intellectual virtues must be “indexed to world views” (318) which is line-drawing maneuver that would remove religious beliefs deemed basic in a given tradition from rational criticism. Still, the overall effect of the authors’ regulative epistemology is nevertheless to put religious believers and secularists, and again Christian and non-Ch…Read more
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39Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity. By John Greco. (Cambridge UP, 2010. Pp. x + 205. Price £17.99/US$29.99.)Philosophical Quarterly 62 (246): 208-211. 2012.A Review of John Greco's book Acheiving Knowledge. The critical points I make involve three claims Greco makes that represent common ground between the reliabilists (including agent reliabilists like himself) and the character epistemologists (which would include myself): I. Such virtues are often needed to make our cognitive abilities reliable (to turn mere faculties into excellences); II. Such virtues might be essentially involved in goods other than knowledge; III. Such virtues might be valu…Read more
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22Logicism, Pragmatism, and Metascience: Towards a Pancritical Pragmatic Theory of Meta-Level DiscoursePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990. 1990.The faults of logical empiricist accounts of metascientific discourse are examined through a study of the modifications Carnap makes to his version of the program over four decades. As empiricists acquiesced on the distinction between theory and observation, Carnap attempted to retain and insulate an equally suspect sharp distinction between the theoretic and the pragmatic. Carnap's later philosophy was understood as a modification of the program in the direction of pragmatism. But neither the k…Read more
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44Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991.
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277Comparative dialectics: Nishida kitarō's logic of place and western dialectical thoughtPhilosophy East and West 41 (2): 163-184. 1991.Philosophical anthropologist Mircea Eliade once said that "the union of opposites" is a basic category of archaic ontology and comparative world religions. In this paper I develop the theory of contrariety or opposition as a prime focus for East/West comparative philosophy. The paper considers especially Nishida Kitaro's later works and the complex phrase "zettai mujuntekijikodbitsu," variously translated by Schinzinger as "absolute contradictory self-identity," "the self-identity of absolute co…Read more
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677Agency ascriptions in ethics and epistemology: Or, navigating intersections, narrow and broadMetaphilosophy 41 (1-2): 73-94. 2010.Abstract: In this article, the logic and functions of character-trait ascriptions in ethics and epistemology is compared, and two major problems, the "generality problem" for virtue epistemologies and the "global trait problem" for virtue ethics, are shown to be far more similar in structure than is commonly acknowledged. I suggest a way to put the generality problem to work by making full and explicit use of a sliding scale--a "narrow-broad spectrum of trait ascription"-- and by accounting for …Read more
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625Utilitarianism and Dewey's “Three Independent Factors in Morals”ISUS-X Conference Proceedings, Kadish Center for Morality, Law and Public Affairs, Boalt Hall, Berkeley CA. 2008.The centennial of Dewey & Tuft’s Ethics (1908) provides a timely opportunity to reflect both on Dewey’s intellectual debt to utilitarian thought, and on his critique of it. In this paper I examine Dewey’s assessment of utilitarianism, but also his developing view of the good (ends; consequences), the right (rules; obligations) and the virtuous (approbations; standards) as “three independent factors in morals.” This doctrine (found most clearly in the 2nd edition of 1932) as I argue in the last s…Read more
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1Review of Rosenbaum (review)Contemporary Pragmatism 178-187. 2003.There are many books on the market about religion in American thought and history, but the idea for a collection of essays focused directly upon pragmatist reconstructions of religious belief and sentiment is overdue. Stuart Rosenbaum’s reader admirably fills this need, and is bound to bring fresh insights to students and advanced researchers alike.
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694Two for the show: Anti-luck and virtue epistemologies in consonanceSynthese 158 (3). 2007.This essay extends my side of a discussion begun earlier with Duncan Pritchard, the recent author of Epistemic Luck. Pritchard’s work contributes significantly to improving the “diagnostic appeal” of a neo-Moorean philosophical response to radical scepticism. While agreeing with Pritchard in many respects, the paper questions the need for his concession to the sceptic that the neo-Moorean is capable at best of recovering “‘brute’ externalist knowledge”. The paper discusses and directly respond…Read more
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1116Possibility and Permission? Intellectual Character, Inquiry, and the Ethics of BeliefIn Pihlstrom S. & Rydenfelt H. (eds.), William James on Religion, (palgrave Mcmillan “philosophers in Depth” Series. 2014.This chapter examines the modifications William James made to his account of the ethics of belief from his early ‘subjective method’ to his later heightened concerns with personal doxastic responsibility and with an empirically-driven comparative research program he termed a ‘science of religions’. There are clearly tensions in James’ writings on the ethics of belief both across his career and even within Varieties itself, tensions which some critics think spoil his defense of what he calls reli…Read more
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589From Internalist Evidentialism to Virtue Responsibilism: Reasonable Disagreement and the Ethics of BeliefIn Trent Dougherty (ed.), Evidentialism and its Discontents, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011.Evidentialism as its leading proponents describe it has two distinct senses, these being evidentialism as a conceptual analysis of epistemic justification, and as a prescriptive ethics of belief—an account of what one ‘ought to believe’ under different epistemic circumstances. These two senses of evidentialism are related, but in the work of leading evidentialist philosophers, in ways that I think are deeply problematic. Although focusing on Richard Feldman’s ethics of belief, this chapter is cr…Read more
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66Courage, Caution and Heaven’s GateThe Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 4 77-89. 1999.The criteria of “forced, live, and momentous options,” as William James utilized them in his pragmatic defense of religious belief, cannot, I argue, both support religious pluralism and acknowledge lessons about failure of epistemic responsibility in Heaven’s Gate-followers. But I attempt to re-vitalize the pragmatic argument, showing it capable of walking this narrow line. I proceed (1) by developing the distinction and relationship between a commitment to a particular religious system or commu…Read more
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944Three Independent Factors in EpistemologyContemporary Pragmatism 6 (2). 2009.We articulate John Dewey’s “independent factors” approach to moral philosophy and then adapt and extend this approach to address contemporary debate concerning the nature and sources of epistemic normativity. We identify three factors (agent reliability, synchronic rationality, and diachronic rationality) as each making a permanent contribution to epistemic value. Critical of debates that stem from the reductionistic ambitions of epistemological systems that privilege of one or another of these …Read more
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123The Role of the Intellectual Virtues in the Reunification of EpistemologyThe Monist 81 (3): 488-508. 1998.If description of mental processes and evaluation of agents and their beliefs are rightly to be considered as complementary concerns on any plausible construal of the epistemological project, then this relationship cries out for explanation. For the complementarity of these concerns is hardly straightforward: One cannot epistemically evaluate a belief without knowing how it was formed, a causal or a scientific question; on the other hand, epistemic norms are and must be used to evaluate our scie…Read more
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133(More) Springs of my DiscontentLogos and Episteme 3 (1): 131-137. 2012.A further reply to Trent Dougherty, author of Evidentialism and its Discontents, on a range of issues that evidentialists like Dougherty and Feldman, and pragmatists like myself have very different views about. These issues include a regarding a proper understanding of epistemic normativity and its relationship with doxastic responsibility. Pragmatists and virtue theorists are champions of the diachronic. The norms which should advise our ethics of belief are primarily diachronic; neither is the…Read more
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281Religious Pluralism and its Discontents: Faith and the ‘Logic of Exclusion'Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion 8 49-74. 2003.Debate over the adequacy of John Hick's conception of religious pluralism is engaged in a comparative manner.
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134In the tracks of the historicist movement: Re-assessing the Carnap-Kuhn connectionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 24 (1): 119-146. 1993.Thirty years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sharp disagreement persists concerning the implications of Kuhn’s "historicist" challenge to empiricism. I discuss the historicist movement over the past thirty years, and the extent to which the discourse between two branches of the historical school has been influenced by tacit assumptions shared with Rudolf Carnap’s empiricism. I begin with an examination of Carnap’s logicism --his logic of science-- …Read more
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89Epistemic luck in light of the virtuesIn Abrol Fairweather & Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (eds.), Virtue epistemology: essays on epistemic virtue and responsibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 158--177. 2001.The presence of luck in our cognitive as in our moral lives shows that the quality of our intellectual character may not be entirely up to us as individuals, and that our motivation and even our ability to desire the truth, like our moral goodness, can be fragile. This paper uses epistemologists' responses to the problem of “epistemic luck” as a sounding board for this fragility; it locates the source of much of the internalist-externalist debate in epistemology in divergent, value-charged “inte…Read more
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520Blind Man’s Bluff: The Basic Belief Apologetic as Anti-skeptical StratagemPhilosophical Studies 130 (1): 131--152. 2006.Today we find philosophical naturalists and Christian theists both expressing an interest in virtue epistemology, while starting out from vastly different assumptions. What can be done to increase fruitful dialogue among these divergent groups of virtue-theoretic thinkers? The primary aim of this paper is to uncover more substantial common ground for dialogue by wielding a double-edged critique of certain assumptions shared by `scientific' and `theistic' externalisms, assumptions that undermin…Read more
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39Book Reviews : Daniel Little, Varieties of Social Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991. pp. vii, 258. $19.95. John Holmwood and Alexander Stewart. Explanation and Social Theory. Lon don : MacMillan, 1991. pp. x, 244. $49.95 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 24 (2): 252-256. 1994.
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648Recovering ResponsibilityLogos and Episteme 2 (3): 429-454. 2011.This paper defends the epistemological importance of ‘diachronic’ or cross-temporal evaluation of epistemic agents against an interesting dilemma posed for this view in Trent Dougherty’s recent paper “Reducing Responsibility.” This is primarily a debate between evidentialists and character epistemologists, and key issues of contention that the paper treats include the divergent functions of synchronic and diachronic (longitudinal) evaluations of agents and their beliefs, the nature and sources o…Read more
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70Teaching James’s “The Will to Believe”Teaching Philosophy 24 (4): 325-345. 2001.William James’s lecture “The Will to Believe” presents his pragmatic “defense” of religious beliefs, one aimed at rebutting W. K. Clifford’s famous evidentialist principle that “It is always wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” This paper presents a number of classroom tools and techniques for teaching James’s lecture, for contrasting it against arguments for God’s existence, and for positioning his lecture in a broader context of the “ethics …Read more
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750Bridging a Fault Line: On underdetermination and the ampliative adequacy of competing theoriesIn Abrol Fairweather (ed.), Virtue Epistemology Naturalized: Bridges Between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, Synthese Library. pp. 227-245. 2014.This paper pursues Ernan McMullin‘s claim ("Virtues of a Good Theory" and related papers on theory-choice) that talk of theory virtues exposes a fault-line in philosophy of science separating "very different visions" of scientific theorizing. It argues that connections between theory virtues and virtue epistemology are substantive rather than ornamental, since both address underdetermination problems in science, helping us to understand the objectivity of theory choice and more specifically what…Read more
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110Reflective Knowledge: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge – Ernest SosaPhilosophical Quarterly 61 (242): 203-205. 2011.A review of Ernest Sosa’s book Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. While I think Sosa is quite right that knowledge lies on a spectrum, and that its higher but not its lower reaches require of knowers, when challenged, a strong degree of explanatory coherence (ability to understand and discursively defend the basis of their beliefs), I also point out problems with certain aspects of his account.
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7Cognitive Economy (review)Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy 19 (60): 14-16. 1991.
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761William James on Emotion and MoralsIn Jacob Goodson (ed.), Cries of the Wounded: William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Moral Life, Rowman & Littlefield. forthcoming.The Emotions chapter (XXV) in James' Principles of Psychology traverses the entire range of experienced emotions from the “coarser” and more instinctual to the “subtler” emotions intimately involved in cognitive, moral, and aesthetic aspects of life. But Principles limits himself to an account of emotional consciousness and so there are few direct discussions in the text of Principles about what later came to be called moral psychology, and fewer about anything resembling philosophical ethics. S…Read more
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755Thinking Twice about Virtue and Vice: Philosophical Situationism and the Vicious Minds HypothesisLogos and Episteme 8 (1): 7-39. 2017.This paper provides an empirical defense of credit theories of knowing against Mark Alfano’s challenges to them based on his theses of inferential cognitive situationism and of epistemic situationism. In order to support the claim that credit theories can treat many cases of cognitive success through heuristic cognitive strategies as credit-conferring, the paper develops the compatibility between virtue epistemologies qua credit theories, and dual-process theories in cognitive psychology. It als…Read more
Radford, Virginia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Epistemology |
Philosophy of Religion |
Virtue Epistemology |
Inductive Reasoning |
Critical Thinking |
William James |
John Dewey |