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40Paul Guyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (review)Philosophy in Review 27 (3): 182. 2007.
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54A Refutation of Idealism from 1777Idealistic Studies 40 (1-2): 139-146. 2010.The paper identifies a possible precedent for Kant’s Refutation of Idealism in the work of Johann Nicolaus Tetens. An attempt is made to reconstruct the reasoning that led Tetens to reject idealism as a false starting point, and some parallels are drawn between Tetens’s psychologistic approach to the problem andKant’s transcendental methodology.
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1Seeing a Flower in the Garden: Common Sense, Transcendental IdealismIn Elizabeth Robinson & Chris W. Surprenant (eds.), Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment, Routledge. 2017.Stapleford (2007) identified Johann Nicolaus Tetens as the missing link between Reid’s common sense treatment of external world scepticism and Kant’s transcendental Refutation of Idealism. While that account is arguably correct, it failed to recognize the distinction between being justified in believing P and being justified in believing that my belief in P is justified. This paper corrects the oversight and explains its implications. Tetens emerges as a weak externalist regarding knowledge of e…Read more
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35Tom Sorell, G. A. J. Rogers, and Jill Kraye, eds. , 'Scientia' in Early Modern Philosophy: Seventeenth-Century Thinkers on Demonstrative Knowledge from First Principles . Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 30 (6): 438-441. 2010.
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1Kenneth R. Westphal, Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 26 (4): 308-310. 2006.
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85Berkeley’s Principles: Expanded and ExplainedRoutledge. 2016.Berkeley's Principles: Expanded and Explained includes the entire classical text of the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in bold font, a running commentary blended seamlessly into the text in regular font and analytic summaries of each section. The commentary is like a professor on hand to guide the reader through every line of the daunting prose and every move in the intricate argumentation. The unique design helps students learn how to read and engage with one of modern ph…Read more
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139Epistemic Value Monism and the Swamping ProblemRatio 29 (3): 283-297. 2016.Many deontologists explain the epistemic value of justification in terms of its instrumental role in promoting truth – the original source of value in the epistemic domain. The swamping problem for truth monism appears to make this position indefensible, at least for those monists who maintain the superiority of knowledge to merely true belief. I propose a new solution to the swamping problem that allows monists to maintain the greater epistemic value of knowledge over merely true belief. My tri…Read more
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75Reid, Tetens, and Kant on the External WorldIdealistic Studies 37 (2): 87-104. 2007.Building on the research of Manfred Kuehn, the author argues that, whatever influence the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy of Thomas Reid may have had on the development of Immanuel Kant’s refutation of idealism, it was filtered through the thinking of Kant’s largely forgotten German contemporary, Johann Nicolaus Tetens. While the importance of Tetens for understanding Kant is examined in connection with only one idea, the aim is to demonstrate that Tetens is a figure worthy of serious historica…Read more
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1514Epistemic duties and failure to understand one’s evidencePrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 16 (1): 147-177. 2012.The paper defends the thesis that our epistemic duty is the duty to proportion our beliefs to the evidence we possess. An inclusive view of evidence possessed is put forward on the grounds that it makes sense of our intuitions about when it is right to say that a person ought to believe some proposition P. A second thesis is that we have no epistemic duty to adopt any particular doxastic attitudes. The apparent tension between the two theses is resolved by applying the concept of duty to belief …Read more
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35Strawson and Schaumann on the Metaphysics of Transcendental IdealismSouth African Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 273-279. 2008.The paper is a limited defence of one of P. F. Strawson's least popular declarations about the nature of Kant's transcendental idealism. An attempt is made to relate Strawson's reading to an interpretative controversy that emerged in the years immediately following the publication of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Johann Christian Gottlob Schaumann, an otherwise unremarkable figure, is considered as an early defender of the thoroughly idealistic interpretation in the d…Read more
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114Why There May Be Epistemic DutiesDialogue 54 (1): 63-89. 2015.Chase Wrenn argues that there are no epistemic duties. When it appears that we have an epistemic duty to believe, disbelieve or suspend judgement about some proposition P, we are really under a moral obligation to adopt the attitude towards P that our evidence favours. The argument appeals to theoretical parsimony: our conceptual scheme will be simpler without epistemic duties and we should therefore drop them. I argue that Wrenn’s strategy is flawed. There may well be things that we ought to do…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |