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840Accidentally 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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760A 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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1733Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the WillIn Eric Watkins (ed.), Divine Order, Human Order, and the Order of Nature, 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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1252Real 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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734Review: 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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782Kant 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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1190Causal 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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395Corrigendum 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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257The 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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846Knowledge, Discipline, System, Hope: The Fate of Metaphysics in the Doctrine of MethodIn James O'Shea (ed.), Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 259-279. 2017.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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312Ockham 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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116Kant 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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1188On 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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916Beauty 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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1072Rational 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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1999Real 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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1144Leibniz and Kant on Empirical Miracles: Rationalism, Freedom, and the LawsIn Brandon Look (ed.), Leibniz and Kant, Oxford University Press. pp. 320-354. 2021.Leibniz and Kant were heirs of a biblical theistic tradition which viewed miraculous activity in the world as both possible and actual. But both were also deep explanatory rationalists about the natural world: more committed than your average philosophical theologian to its thoroughgoing intelligibility. These dual sympathies—supernaturalist religion and empirical rationalism—generate a powerful tension across both philosophers’ systems, one that is most palpable in their accounts of empirical m…Read more
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1355Kant's concepts of justificationNoûs 41 (1). 2007.An essay on Kant's theory of justification, where by “justification” is meant the evaluative concept that specifies conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence. Kant employs both epistemic and non-epistemic concepts of justification: an epistemic concept of justification sets out conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence and a candidate (if true an…Read more
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748Causal refutations of idealism revisitedPhilosophical Quarterly 61 (242): 184-186. 2011.Causal refutations of external-world scepticism start from our ability to make justified judgements about the order of our own experiences, and end with the claim that there must be perceptible external objects, some of whose states can be causally correlated with that order. In a recent paper, I made a series of objections to this broadly Kantian anti-sceptical strategy. Georges Dicker has provided substantive replies on behalf of a version of the causal refutation of idealism. Here I offer a f…Read more
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1046'As Kant Has Shown:' Analytic Theology and the Critical PhilosophyIn M. Rea & O. Crisp (eds.), Analytic Theology, Oxford University Press. pp. 116--135. 2009.On why Kant may not have shown what modern theologians often take him to have shown.
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110The Problem of Particularity in Kant’s Aesthetic TheoryIn Kevin A. Stoehr (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, . pp. 197-208. 1998.An early version of "Kant on the Normativity of Taste" above. Original abstract: In moving away from the objective, property-based theories of earlier periods to a subject-based aesthetic, Kant did not intend to give up the idea that judgments of beauty are universalizable. Accordingly, the “Deduction of Judgments of Taste” aims to show how reflective aesthetic judgments can be “imputed” a priori to all human subjects. The Deduction is not successful: Kant manages only to justify the imputation…Read more
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