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1Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 13 (4): 524-529. 1983.
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129Divine InterventionFaith and Philosophy 14 (2): 170-194. 1997.Some philosophers deny that science can investigate the supernatural - specifically, the nature and actions of God. If a divine being is atemporal, then, indeed, this seems plausible - but only, I shall argue, because such a being could not causally interact with anything. Here I discuss in detail two major attempts, those of Stump and Kretzmann, and of Leftow, to make sense of theophysical causation on the supposition that God is eternal. These views are carefully worked out, and their failures…Read more
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45Scientific explanations of mystical experiences: Evan FalesReligious Studies 32 (3): 297-313. 1996.In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston , Wainwright , Yandell , and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific explana…Read more
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3Causal knowledge: What can psychology teach philosophersJournal of Mind and Behavior 13 (1): 1-28. 1992.Theories of how organisms learn about cause-effect relations have a history dating back at least to the associationist/mechanistic hypothesis of David Hume. Some contemporary theories of causal learning are descendants of Hume's mechanistic models of conditioning, but others impute principled, rule-based reasoning. Since even primitive animals are conditionable, it is clear that there are built-in mechanical algorithms that respond to cause/effect relations. The evidence suggests that humans ret…Read more
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40Generic universalsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 60 (1). 1982.This Article does not have an abstract
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72Donnellan on definite descriptionsPhilosophia 6 (2): 289-302. 1976.Donnellan's distinction between the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions is shown not to cover exhaustive and exclusive alternatives but to fix the termini of a continuum of cases. in fact, donnellan's distinction rests on a mixed classification: the referential use, concerned with intended referents regardless of what speakers may say about them; the attributive use, concerned with definite descriptions used in using sentences, that something or other may satisfy. given thi…Read more
Iowa City, Iowa, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |