-
878Noumenal Ignorance: Why, For Kant, Can't We Know Things in Themselves?In Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Kant Handbook, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 91-116. 2017.In this paper we look at a few of the most prominent ways of articulating Kant’s critical argument for Noumenal Ignorance — i.e., the claim that we cannot cognize or have knowledge of any substantive, synthetic truths about things-in-themselves — and then provide two different accounts of our own.
-
378This is a talk given in honor of O'Neill at the Pacific APA when she won the Berggruen Prize in 2018.
-
762Religious Dietary Practices and Secular Food Ethics; or, How to Hope that Your Food Choices Make a Difference Even When You Reasonably Believe That They Don'tIn Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2017.Religious dietary practices foster a sense of communal identity, certainly, but traditionally they are also regarded as pleasing to God (or the gods, or the ancestors) and spiritually beneficial. In other words, for many religious people, the effects of fasting go well beyond what is immediately observed or empirically measurable, and that is a large part of what motivates participation in the practice. The goal of this chapter is to develop that religious way of thinking into a response to a mo…Read more
-
448Can We Really Vote with our Forks? Opportunism and the Threshold ChickenIn Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo & Matthew C. Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating, Routledge. pp. 182-202. 2016.
-
283Kant's theory of causation and its eighteenth-century German backgroundPhilosophical Review 119 (4): 565-591. 2010.This critical notice highlights the important contributions that Eric Watkins's writings have made to our understanding of theories about causation developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy and by Kant in particular. Watkins provides a convincing argument that central to Kant's theory of causation is the notion of a real ground or causal power that is non-Humean (since it doesn't reduce to regularities or counterfactual dependencies among events or states) and non-Leibnizean because it d…Read more
-
3769Religion and the SublimeIn Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The sublime: from antiquity to the present, Cambridge University Press. pp. 183-202. 2012.Warning: includes two somewhat graphic images. This paper is an effort to lay out a taxomony of conceptual relations between the domains of the sublime and the religious.
-
30Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts) (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.Thirteen original essays examine the conceptual history of evil in the west: from ancient Hebrew literature and Greek drama to Darwinism and Holocaust theory. Thirteen reflections contextualize the philosophical developments by looking at evil through the eyes of animals, poets, mystics, witches, librettists, film directors, and tech executives.
-
122Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating (edited book)Routledge. 2016.Everyone is talking about food. Chefs are celebrities. "Locavore" and "freegan" have earned spots in the dictionary. Popular books and films about food production and consumption are exposing the unintended consequences of the standard American diet. Questions about the principles and values that ought to guide decisions about dinner have become urgent for moral, ecological, and health-related reasons. In _Philosophy Comes to Dinner_, twelve philosophers—some leading voices, some inspiring new o…Read more
-
319Ulrich Lehner, Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und -theologie , pp. 532 + ix, $139 (review)Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (1): 143-147. 2012.A review of Ulrich Lehner's recent book on Kant's philosophy of history.
-
51Kant's Modal Metaphysics, by Nicholas Stang (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 16. 2016.A review of Nicholas Stang's 2016 book, Kant's Modal Metaphysics
-
124God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion (Festschrift for Nicholas Wolterstorff) (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.Philosophy of religion in the Anglo-American tradition experienced a 'rebirth' following the 1955 publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology (eds. Antony Flew and Alisdair MacIntyre). Fifty years later, this volume of New Essays offers a sampling of the best work in what is now a very active field, written by some of its most prominent members. A substantial introduction sketches the developments of the last half-century, while also describing the 'ethics of belief' debate in epistemolo…Read more
-
448Review: 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.
-
2208Kant, 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
-
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.
-
854Accidentally 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
-
768A 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.
-
1295Real 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
-
1751Rational 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
-
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.
-
801Kant 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.
-
1210Causal 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
-
389Corrigendum to: Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, and CoherenceKant Studien 00-00. 2015.Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Heft: Ahead of print
-
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
-
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.
-
859Knowledge, 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
-
118Kant 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
-
1200On 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. -/- .
-
938Beauty 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.
-
2032Real 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
-
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
APA Eastern Division
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Immanuel Kant |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Religion |
Food Ethics |
Hope |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Aesthetics |
19th Century Philosophy |
European Philosophy |
Immanuel Kant |
PhilPapers Editorships
1 more
Hope |
Immanuel Kant |
Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Kant: Skepticism |
Kant: Aesthetic Judgment |
Neo-Kantianism |