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48The Reliabilist Theory of Rational BeliefThe Monist 68 (2): 203-225. 1985.Niceties aside, Reliabilism is the claim that a belief is justified or rational if and only if it has a reliable source. One way to arrive at a belief is by inferring it from others through the application of a rule of inference. Hence Reliabilism has the consequence that a belief arrived at by applying a given rule of inference is rational if and only if arriving at that belief by applying the rule is reliable. This consequence of Reliabilism I will call the Reliabilist’s Thesis.
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12The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics (edited book)Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield. 1987.This volume of original essays assesses Nozick's analyses of knowledge and evidence and his approach to skepticism. Several of the contributors claim that Nozick has not succeeded in rebutting the skeptic; some offer fresh accounts of skepticism and its flaws; others criticize Nozick's externalist accounts of knowledge and evidence; still others welcome externalism but attempt to replace Nozick's accounts of knowledge and evidence with more plausible analyses.
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60The knower, inside and outSynthese 74 (3): 349-67. 1988.Adherents of the epistemological position called internalism typically believe that the view they oppose, called externalism, is such a new and radical departure from the established way of seeing knowledge that its implications are uninteresting. Perhaps itis relatively novel, but the approach to knowledge with the greatest antiquity is the one that equates it withcertainty, and while this conception is amenable to the demands of the internalist, it is also a non-starter in the opinion of almos…Read more
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311The epistemic predicament: Knowledge, Nozickian tracking, and scepticismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1). 1984.This Article does not have an abstract
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218The causal indicator analysis of knowledgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (4): 563-587. 1987.
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90Restorative Rigging and the Safe Indication AccountSynthese 153 (1): 161-170. 2006.Typical Gettieresque scenarios involve a subject, S, using a method, M, of believing something, p, where, normally, M is a reliable indicator of the truth of p, yet, in S’s circumstances, M is not reliable: M is deleteriously rigged. A different sort of scenario involves rigging that restores the reliability of a method M that is deleteriously rigged: M is restoratively rigged. Some theorists criticize the safe indication account of knowledge defended by Luper, Sosa, and Williamson on the ground…Read more
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35PersimalsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 52 (S1): 140-162. 2014.What sort of thing, fundamentally, are you and I? For convenience, I use the term persimal to refer to the kind of thing we are, whatever that kind turns out to be. Accordingly, the question is, what are persimals? One possible answer is that persimalhood consists in being a human animal, but many theorists, including Derek Parfit and Jeff McMahan, not to mention John Locke, reject this idea in favor of a radically different view, according to which persimalhood consists in having certain sorts …Read more
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54The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays (edited book)Ashgate Publishing. 2003.Presented throughout in an accessible style, this book will prove particularly useful for students, researchers and general readers of philosophy who are ...
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2Cartesian SkepticismIn Duncan Pritchard & Sven Bernecker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 414--424. 2011.
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29The AMA on Euthanasia and Assisted SuicidePerspectives in Biology and Medicine 59 (2): 189-197. 2016.The American Medical Association opposes physician-assisted suicide on the grounds that it “would ultimately cause more harm than good,” because it is “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer,” and because it “would be difficult or impossible to control and would pose serious societal risks”. It condemns the practice of euthanasia as conducted by physicians for these reasons as well, and adds, by way of clarifying the serious risks at hand, that “euthanasia could readily b…Read more
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57Despite its plausibility, I mean to resist this argument. I will reject premise 1 on the grounds that dying may be atemporally bad for us. I will also reject premise 3. Some postmortem events are bad for some of us while we are alive. But I am not going to report some new exotic particle that makes backwards causation possible. As far as I know, 6 is true. If an event is responsible for a harm that we incur before the event itself occurs, it might be said to harm us retroactively ; if when or af…Read more
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32Living Up to DeathInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (4): 603-606. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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38Essential Knowledge: Readings in Epistemology (edited book)Longman. 2003.With its balance of both classic selections and cutting-edge contemporary writings, this anthology for the beginning student clearly covers all the major historical and leading contemporary approaches to epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. One reviewer says: “...admirably even-handed and fair in its explanations of various views...The chapter introductions are concise and informative... not only are readings selected so as to engage one another in important ways, but the editor serves as a…Read more
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25The subject of this book is epistemology. Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, the study of the nature, sources, and limitations of knowledge and justification. In studying the nature of knowledge and justification, theorists typically try to delineate the conditions that must be met for a given person to know, or justifiably believe, that a given proposition is true. That is, they offer analyses of knowledge and justification. In this introduction, we will briefly describe the task of analy…Read more
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636Surviving Death – Mark JohnstonPhilosophical Quarterly 61 (245): 884-887. 2011.This is a review of Johnston's book Surviving Death.
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84Past Desires and the DeadPhilosophical Studies 126 (3): 331-345. 2005.I examine an argument that appears to take us from Parfit’s [Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1984)] thesis that we have no reason to fulfil desires we no longer care about to the conclusion that the effect of posthumous events on our desires is a matter of indifference (the post-mortem thesis). I suspect that many of Parfit’s readers, including Vorobej [Philosophical Studies 90 (1998) 305], think that he is committed to (something like) this reasoning, and that Parfit must therefor…Read more
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43‘Skepticism’ refers primarily to two positions. Knowledge skepticism says there is no such thing as knowledge, and justification skepticism denies the existence of justified belief. How closely the two views are related depends on the relationship between knowledge and justification: if knowledge entails justified belief, as many theorists say, then justification skepticism entails knowledge skepticism (but not vice versa). Either form of skepticism can be limited in scope. Global (or radical) s…Read more
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101DeathStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.First, what constitutes a person's death? It is clear enough that people die when their lives end, but less clear what constitutes the ending of a person's life.
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14The Cambridge Companion to Life and Death (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2014.This volume meets the increasing interest in a range of philosophical issues connected with the nature and significance of life and death, and the ethics of killing. What is it to be alive and to die? What is it to be a person? What must time be like if we are to persist? What makes one life better than another? May death or posthumous events harm the dead? The chapters in this volume address these questions, and also discuss topical issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and suicide. They explore…Read more
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41Review of Ben Bradley, Well-Being and Death (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (7). 2009.
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219Mortal harmPhilosophical Quarterly 57 (227). 2007.The harm thesis says that death may harm the individual who dies. The posthumous harm thesis says that posthumous events may harm those who die. Epicurus rejects both theses, claiming that there is no subject who is harmed, no clear harm which is received, and no clear time when any harm is received. Feldman rescues the harm thesis with solutions to Epicurus' three puzzles based on his own version of the deprivation account of harm. But many critics, among them Lamont, Grey, Feit and Bradley, ha…Read more
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167Exhausting LifeThe Journal of Ethics 17 (1-2): 99-119. 2013.Can we render death harmless to us by perfecting life, as the ancient Epicureans and Stoics seemed to think? It might seem so, for after we perfect life—assuming we can—persisting would not make life any better. Dying earlier rather than later would shorten life, but a longer perfect life is no better than a shorter perfect life, so dying would take nothing of value from us. However, after sketching what perfecting life might entail, I will argue that it is not a desirable approach to invulnerab…Read more
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20The Possibility of knowledge: Nozick and his critics (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield. 1987.This volume of original essays assesses Nozick's analyses of knowledge and evidence and his approach to skepticism. Several of the contributors claim that Nozick has not succeeded in rebutting the skeptic; some offer fresh accounts of skepticism and its flaws; others criticize Nozick's externalist accounts of knowledge and evidence; still others welcome externalism but attempt to replace Nozick's accounts of knowledge and evidence with more plausible analyses.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Normative Ethics |