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11A. W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant's Moral and Religious Philosophy (review)Philosophical Review 115 (1): 118-121. 2006.
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869Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, by Christine M. Korsgaard (review)Mind 130 (517): 363-373. 2020.A review of "Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals," by Christine M. Korsgaard. New York: Oxford, 2018. Pp. 271.
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454Can't Kant Cognize His Empirical Self? Or, a Problem for (almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of IdealismIn Andrew Stephenson & Anil Gomes (eds.), Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self, Oxford University Press. pp. 138-158. 2017.Kant seems to think of our own mental states or representations as the primary objects of inner sense. But does he think that these states also inhere in something? And, if so, is that something an empirical substance that is also cognized in inner sense? This chapter provides textual and philosophical grounds for thinking that, although Kant may agree with Hume that the self is not ‘given’ in inner sense exactly, he does think of the self as cognized through inner sense. It is also argued that …Read more
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879Noumenal 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.
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378This is a talk given in honor of O'Neill at the Pacific APA when she won the Berggruen Prize in 2018.
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763Religious 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
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449Can 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.
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284Kant'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
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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.
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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.
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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
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320Ulrich 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.
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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
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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
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816Review: 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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522The Devil, The Virgin, and the Envoy: Symbols of Moral Struggle in Religion II.2In Otfried Hoeffe (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen, Akademie Verlag. pp. 111-129. 2010.Part of a group commentary on Kant's Religion book. This chapter focuses on Part 2, section 2 on "The Evil Principle's Rightful Claim to Dominion over the Human Being, and the Struggle of the Two Principles with One Another"
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1148Modal 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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162Descartes 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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57Are Supersensibles Really Possible? The Evidential Role of SymbolsIn Valerio Hrsg v. Rohden, Ricardo Terra & Guido Almeida (eds.), Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants, De Gruyter. 2008.Kant on how certain experiences might give us considerations counting in favor of the real possibility of certain things.
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720Three 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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803Ogilby, 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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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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1916Kant, 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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922Kant 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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571Can 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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112Kant's Anatomy of Evil (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (2): 393-397. 2014.No abstract
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793The 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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450Review: 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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2210Kant, 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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