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663Three 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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547Kantian Fallibilism: Knowledge, Certainty, DoubtMidwest Studies in Philosophy 45 99-128. 2021.For Kant, knowledge involves certainty. If “certainty” requires that the grounds for a given propositional attitude guarantee its truth, then this is an infallibilist view of epistemic justification. Such a view says you can’t have epistemic justification for an attitude unless the attitude is also true. Here I want to defend an alternative fallibilist interpretation. Even if a subject has grounds that would be sufficient for knowledge if the proposition were true, the proposition might not be t…Read more
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536Can 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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480Liturgical Philosophy of Religion: An Untimely Manifesto on Sincerity, Acceptance, and HopeIn M. David Eckel, Allen Speight & Troy DuJardin (eds.), The Future of the Philosophy of Religion, Springer. pp. 73-94. 2021.This loosely-argued manifesto contains some suggestions regarding what the philosophy of religion might become in the 21st century. It was written for a brainstorming workshop over a decade ago, and some of the recommendations and predictions it contains have already been partly actualized (that’s why it is now a bit "untimely"). The goal is to sketch three aspects of a salutary “liturgical turn” in philosophy of religion. (Note: “liturgy” here refers very broadly to communal religious service…Read more
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479The Devil, The Virgin, and the Envoy: Symbols of Moral Struggle in Religion II.2In Otfried Höffe (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen, Akademie Verlag. pp. 111-129. 2011.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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478Ulrich 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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436Knowledge, Anxiety, Hope: How Kant’s First and Third Questions Relate (Keynote address)In Beatrix Himmelmann & Camilla Serck-Hanssen (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress, De Gruyter. pp. 127-149. 2021.
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432Kant's Panentheism: The Possibility Proof of 1763 and Its Fate in the Critical PeriodIn Ina Goy (ed.), Kant on Proofs for God’s Existence, De Gruyter. 2023.This chapter discusses Kant's 1763 "possibility proof" for the existence of God. I first provide a reconstruction of the proof in its two stages, and then revisit my earlier argument according to which the being the proof delivers threatens to be a Spinozistic-panentheistic God—a being whose properties include the entire spatio-temporal universe—rather than the traditional, ontologically distinct God of biblical monotheism. I go on to evaluate some recent alternative readings that have sought …Read more
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428Demoralization and Hope: A Psychological Reading of Kant’s Moral ArgumentThe Monist 106 (1): 46-60. 2023.Kant’s “primacy of the practical” doctrine says that we can form morally justified commitments regarding what exists, even in the absence of sufficient epistemic grounds. In this paper I critically examine three different varieties of Kant’s “moral proof” that can be found in the critical works. My claim is that the third variety—the “moral-psychological argument” based in the need to sustain moral hope and avoid demoralization—has some intriguing advantages over the other two. It starts with a …Read more
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411Review: 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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407Kant, Wood and Moral ArgumentsKantian Review 27 (1): 61-70. 2022.In this article I discuss the moral-coherence reading of Kant’s moral argument offered by Allen Wood in his recent book _Kant and Religion_, display some of the challenges that it faces and suggest that a moral-psychological formulation is preferable.
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402Can'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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393Can We Really Vote with our Forks? Opportunism and the Threshold ChickenIn Andrew Chignell, Terence Cuneo & Matthew Halteman (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating, Routledge. pp. 182-202. 2015.
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382Hope and Despair at the Kantian Chicken Factory: Moral Arguments about Making a DifferenceIn John J. Callanan & Lucy Allais (eds.), Kant and Animals, Oxford University Press. pp. 213-238. 2020.
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374Kant on the Highest Good and Moral ArgumentsIn Andrew Stephenson & Anil Gomes (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Kant, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.Kant’s accounts of the Highest Good and the moral argument for God and immortality are central features of his philosophy. But both involve lingering puzzles. In this entry, we first explore what the Highest Good is for Kant and the role it plays in a complete account of ethical life. We then focus on whether the Highest Good involves individuals only, or whether it also connects with Kant’s doctrines about the moral progress of the species. In conclusion, we look into three ways of articulatin…Read more
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362Corrigendum 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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349Introduction: 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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337This 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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312Philosophy of Religion in Modern European Thought 1600-1800The Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion. 2021.The early modern period (roughly, 1600–1800 ce) in Europe brought tremendous changes in intellectual, political, and cultural life. It was a period in which philosophical debates were inevitably bound up with questions about the nature and sources of religious truth. A chronological examination of some of the period’s major thinkers highlights two issues that were central to the development of philosophy of religion in the period. The first concerns the relations between God, the soul, and the b…Read more
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280Ockham 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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270Kant'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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257Kant's One-World Phenomenalism: How the Moral Features AppearIn Karl Schafer & Nicholas Stang (eds.), The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant's Metaphysics and Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 337-359. 2022.The goal of this paper is to sketch an account of Kant’s signature metaphysical doctrine (transcendental idealism) that (a) has no supporters – as far as I am aware – in the contemporary literature, and (b) draws its primary motivation (as interpretation) from considerations regarding our practical situation and needs as agents. The consideration I focus on here is that people not only have mental and moral features, but they also appear to us – in our daily experience – to have such features: …Read more
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247The 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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199Inefficacy, Despair, and Difference-Making: A Secular Application of Kant's Moral ArgumentIn Alessandro Pinzani & Luigi Caranti (eds.), Kant and the Problem of Morality: Rethinking the Contemporary World, Routledge. pp. 47-72. 2022.Those of us who enjoy certain products of the global industrial economy but also believe it is wrong to consume them are often so demoralized by the apparent inefficacy of our individual, private choices that we are unable to resist. Although he was a deontologist, Kant was clearly aware of this ‘consequent-dependent’ side of our moral psychology. One version of his ‘moral proof’ is designed to respond to the threat of such demoralization in pursuit of the Highest Good. That version of the argum…Read more
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170Prolegomena to any future non-doxastic religionReligious Studies 49 (2): 195-207. 2013.A discussion of the relationship between religion and belief, in the context of an engagement with J.L. Schellenberg's recent "Prolegomena." I suggest that there may be an authentic way of being "religious" without having full-blown religious belief.
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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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158Evil, Unintelligiblity, Radicality: Footnotes to a Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl JaspersIn Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts), Oxford University Press. pp. 18-42. 2019.This chapter articulates two concerns that Karl Jaspers raised (with Hannah Arendt) about the common practice of viewing moral evil as unintelligible. The first is that this involves exoticizing the act and/or perpetrator in such a way that moral condemnation becomes difficult. The second is that it can lead us to treat the perpetrator, place, or victim as tainted or stained by a force whose motives we cannot grasp; this in turn can lead to magical thinking about evil as somehow contagious or co…Read more
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129God 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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124Infant suffering revisitedReligious Studies 37 (4): 475-484. 2001.I respond to two sets of objections to my characterization of infant suffering and the problem that it presents to traditional theism. My main theses were that infant suffering to death is not ‘horrendous’ in the technical sense defined, but that a good God still needs to "balance off" rather than "defeat" such suffering. David Basinger, on the other hand, claims that some infant suffering should be considered horrendous, while Nathan Nobis suggests that such suffering must be defeated rather th…Read more
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117Philosophy 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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