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920Review: Saving God from Saving God (review)Books and Culture 15 (3). 2012.Mark Johnston’s book, Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2010) has two main goals, one negative and the other positive: (1) to eliminate the gods of the major Western monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as candidates for the role of “the Highest One”; (2) to introduce the real Highest One, a panentheistic deity worthy of devotion and capable of extending to us the grace needed to transform us from inwardly-turned sinners to practitioners of agape. In this review, we argue that Jo…Read more
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1119Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, and CoherenceKant Studien 105 (4): 573-597. 2014.My goal in this paper is to show that Kant’s prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge of things-in-themselves is motivated less by his anti-soporific encounter with Hume than by his new view of the distinction between “real” and “logical” modality, a view that developed out of his reflection on the rationalist tradition in which he was trained. In brief: at some point in the 1770’s, Kant came to hold that a necessary condition on knowing a proposition is that one be able to prove that all the i…Read more
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1Kant's Ethics of Assent: Knowledge and Belief in the Critical PhilosophyDissertation, Yale University. 2004.Most accounts of Kant's epistemology focus narrowly on cognition and knowledge . Kant himself, however, thought that there are many other important species of assent : opinion, persuasion, conviction, belief, acceptance, and assent to the deliverances of common sense. ;My goal in this dissertation is to isolate and motivate the principles of rational acceptability which, for Kant, govern each of these kinds of assent, instead of focusing merely on cognition and knowledge. Some of the principles …Read more
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161Descartes on Sensation: A Defense of the Semantic-Causation ModelPhilosophers' Imprint 9 1-22. 2009.Descartes's lack of clarity about the causal connections between brain states and mental states has led many commentators to conclude that he has no coherent account of body-mind relations in sensation, or that he was simply confused about the issue. In this paper I develop what I take to be a coherent account that was available to Descartes, and argue that there are both textual and systematic reasons to think that it was his considered view. The account has brain states serving as occasions fo…Read more
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715Three Skeptics and the Critique: Review of Michael Forster's Kant and SkepticismPhilosophical Books 51 (4): 228-244. 2010.A long critical notice of Michael Forster's recent book, "Kant and Skepticism." We argue that Forster's characterization of Kant's response to skepticism is both textually dubious and philosophically flawed. -/- .
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57Are Supersensibles Really Possible? The Evidential Role of SymbolsIn V. Rhoden, T. Terra & G. Almeida (eds.), Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants, Degruyter. 2009.Kant on how certain experiences might give us considerations counting in favor of the real possibility of certain things.
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79Review: Glock (ed.), Strawson and Kant (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (8). 2004.A review of Hans-Johann Glock's edited volume.
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796Ogilby, Milton, Canary Wine, and the Red Scorpion: Another Look at Kant's Deduction of TasteIn Dina Emundts (ed.), Self, World, and Art: Metaphysical Topics in Kant and Hegel, De Gruyter. pp. 261-282. 2013.An effort to expand and defend aspects of my earlier reading of the Deduction of Taste. The Red Scorpion is just for fun.
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1901Kant, Real Possibility, and the Threat of SpinozaMind 121 (483): 635-675. 2012.In the first part of the paper I reconstruct Kant’s proof of the existence of a ‘most real being’ while also highlighting the theory of modality that motivates Kant’s departure from Leibniz’s version of the proof. I go on to argue that it is precisely this departure that makes the being that falls out of the pre-critical proof look more like Spinoza’s extended natura naturans than an independent, personal creator-God. In the critical period, Kant seems to think that transcendental idealism allow…Read more
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903Kant and the ‘Monstrous’ Ground of Possibility: A Reply to Abaci and YongKantian Review 19 (1): 53-69. 2014.I reply to recent criticisms by Uygar Abaci and Peter Yong, among others, of my reading of Kant's pre-Critical of God's existence, and of its fate in the Critical period. Along the way I discuss some implications of this debate for our understanding of Kant's modal metaphysics and modal epistemology generally.
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565Can 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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791The 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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441Review: 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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2167Kant, 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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352Introduction: 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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762A 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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842Accidentally 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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1268Real 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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1737Rational 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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736Review: 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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