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570Can Kantian Laws Be Broken? Kant on MiraclesRes Philosophica 91 (1): 103-121. 2014.In this paper I explore Kant’s critical discussions of the topic of miracles (including the important but neglected fragment from the 1780s called “On Miracles”) in an effort to answer the question in the title. Along the way I discuss some of the different kinds of “laws” in Kant’s system, and also the argument for his claim that, even if empirical miracles do occur, we will never be in a good position to identify instances of them. I conclude with some tentative remarks about the notorious sug…Read more
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792The ethics of beliefStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2016.The “ ethics of belief” refers to a cluster of questions at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, and ethics. The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief formation, belief maintenance, and belief relinquishment. Is it ever or always morally wrong to hold a belief on insufficient evidence? Is it ever or always morally right to believe on the basis of sufficient evidence, or to withhold belief in the perceive…Read more
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112Kant's Anatomy of Evil (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (2): 393-397. 2014.No abstract
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446Review: Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variation in Kant's Moral and Religious Philosophy (review)Philosophical Review 115 (1): 118-121. 2006.A review of A.W. Moore's book on Kantian themes in religion and ethics.
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2205Kant, Modality, and the Most Real BeingArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 91 (2): 157-192. 2009.Kant's speculative theistic proof rests on a distinction between “logical” and “real” modality that he developed very early in the pre-critical period. The only way to explain facts about real possibility, according to Kant, is to appeal to the properties of a unique, necessary, and “most real” being. Here I reconstruct the proof in its historical context, focusing on the role played by the theory of modality both in motivating the argument (in the pre-critical period) and, ultimately, in undoin…Read more
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353Introduction: On Defending Kant at the AARFaith and Philosophy 29 (2): 144-150. 2012.I briefly describe the unusually contentious author-meets-critics session that was the origin of the book symposium below. I then try to situate the present symposium within broader contemporary scholarship on Kant.
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767A Dialogue Concerning Aesthetics and ApolausticsJournal of Scottish Philosophy 9 (1). 2011.A debate between two aestheticians concerning the relative influence of Scottish and German philosophers on the contemporary discipline.
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853Accidentally true belief and warrantSynthese 137 (3). 2003.The Proper Functionist account of warrant – like many otherexternalist accounts – is vulnerable to certain Gettier-style counterexamples involving accidentally true beliefs. In this paper, I briefly survey the development of the account, noting the way it was altered in response to such counterexamples. I then argue that Alvin Plantinga's latest amendment to the account is flawed insofar as it rules out cases of true beliefs which do intuitively strike us as knowledge, and that a conjecture rece…Read more
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1291Real Repugnance and our Ignorance of Things-in-Themselves: A Lockean Problem in Kant and HegelInternationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus 7 135-159. 2010.Kant holds that in order to have knowledge of an object, a subject must be able to “prove” that the object is really possible—i.e., prove that there is neither logical inconsistency nor “real repugnance” between its properties. This is (usually) easy to do with respect to empirical objects, but (usually) impossible to do with respect to particular things-in-themselves. In the first section of the paper I argue that an important predecessor of Kant’s account of our ignorance of real possibility…Read more
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1746Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the WillIn Eric Watkins (ed.), The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. pp. 197-218. 2013.This paper considers Kant's views on how it can be rational to hope for God's assistance in becoming morally good. If I am fully responsible for making myself good and can make myself good, then my moral condition depends entirely on me. However, if my moral condition depends entirely on me, then it cannot depend on God, and it is therefore impossible for God to provide me with any assistance. But if it is impossible for God to provide me with any assistance, it is irrational for me to hope for …Read more
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746Review: Dicker, Georges, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (review)Philosophical Review 116 (2): 307-309. 2007.A review of Georges Dicker's primer on Kant's theoretical philosophy.
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800Kant between the wars: A reply to HohendahlPhilosophical Forum 41 (1-2): 41-49. 2010.A critique of Peter Hohendahl's account of the fate of Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism in the interwar period.
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1206Causal refutations of idealismPhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 487-507. 2010.In the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ chapter of the first Critique, Kant argues that the conditions required for having certain kinds of mental episodes are sufficient to guarantee that there are ‘objects in space’ outside us. A perennially influential way of reading this compressed argument is as a kind of causal inference: in order for us to make justified judgements about the order of our inner states, those states must be caused by the successive states of objects in space outside us. Here I cons…Read more
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258The problem of infant sufferingReligious Studies 34 (2): 205-217. 1998.The problem of infant suffering and death is often regarded as one of the more difficult versions of the problem of evil (see Ivan Karamazov), especially when one considers how God can be thought good to infant victims by the infant victims. In the first section of this paper, I examine two recent theodicies that aim to solve this problem but (I argue) fail. In the second section, I suggest that the only viable approach to the problem rejects the idea that the suffering of such unfortunates must…Read more
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388Corrigendum to: Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, and CoherenceKant Studien 00-00. 2015.Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Heft: Ahead of print
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321Ockham on Mind-World Relations: What Sort of Nominalism?Eidos: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 11-28. 1997.(Warning: juvenalia from a grad student journal!). On whether Ockham's nominalism is really nominalistic and whether it faces some of the same problems as later nominalisms.
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856Knowledge, Discipline, System, Hope: The Fate of Metaphysics in the Doctrine of MethodIn O'Shea James (ed.), Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 259-279. 2019.In this chapter I highlight the apparent tensions between Kant’s very stringent critique of metaphysical speculation in the “Discipline of Pure Reason” chapter and his endorsement of Belief (Glaube) and hope (Hoffnung) regarding metaphysical theses in the subsequent “Canon of Pure Reason.” In the process I will examine his distinction between the theoretical and the practical bases for holding a “theoretical” conclusion (i.e. a conclusion about “what exists” rather than “what ought to be”) and …Read more
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117Kant on Cognition, Givenness, and IgnoranceJournal of the History of Philosophy 55 (1): 131-142. 2017.Eric Watkins and Marcus Willaschek provide a valuable service to people working on Kant’s epistemology and philosophy of mind by laying out a synoptic picture of Kant’s view of theoretical cognition. Their picture incorporates admirably clear accounts of the familiar building blocks of cognition—sensation, intuition, concept, and judgment—as well as some innovative interpretive theses of their own. Watkins and Willaschek’s basic claim is that, for Kant, theoretical cognition is “a mental state […Read more
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1199On going back to KantPhilosophical Forum 39 (2): 109-124. 2008.A broad overview of the NeoKantian movement in Germany, written as an introduction to a series of essays about that movement. -/- .
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934Beauty as a symbol of natural systematicityBritish Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4): 406-415. 2006.I examine Kant's claim that a relation of symbolization links judgments of beauty and judgments of ‘systematicity’ in nature (that is, judgments concerning the ordering of natural forms under hierarchies of laws). My aim is to show that the symbolic relation between the two is, for Kant, much closer than many commentators think: it is not only the form but also the objects of some of our judgments of taste that symbolize the systematicity of nature.
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2027Real Repugnance and Belief about Things-in-Themselves: A Problem and Kant's Three Solutions (including one about Symbols)In Benjamin J. Bruxvoort Lipscomb & James Krueger (eds.), Kant's Moral Metaphysics: God, Freedom, and Immortality, De Gruyter. pp. 177-209. 2010.Kant says that it can be rational to accept propositions on the basis of non-epistemic or broadly practical considerations, even if those propositions include “transcendental ideas” of supersensible objects. He also worries, however, about how such ideas (of freedom, the soul, noumenal grounds, God, the kingdom of ends, and things-in-themselves generally) acquire genuine positive content in the absence of an appropriate connection to intuitional experience. How can we be sure that the ideas ar…Read more
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1097Rational Hope, Possibility, and Divine ActionIn Gordon E. Michalson (ed.), Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 98-117. 2014.Commentators typically neglect the distinct nature and role of hope in Kant’s system, and simply lump it together with the sort of Belief that arises from the moral proof. Kant himself is not entirely innocent of the conflation. Here I argue, however, that from a conceptual as well as a textual point of view, hope should be regarded as a different kind of attitude. It is an attitude that we can rationally adopt toward some of the doctrines that are not able to be proved from within the bounds of …Read more
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