Evan Fales

Foundationalist epistemologies, whether internalist or externalist, ground noetic structures in beliefs that are said to be foundational, or properly basic. It is essential to such epistemologies that they provide clear criteria for proper basicality. This proves, I argue, to be a thorny task, at least insofar as the goal is to provide a psychologically realistic reconstruction of our actual doxastic practices. I examine some of the difficulties, and suggest some implications, in particular for the externalist epistemology of Alvin Plantinga.

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 this feature of his account, it is easy to construct counterexamples of a hybrid nature. related views (stalnaker's, kaplan's, stampe's) are briefly canvassed

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 are instructive for any attempt to reconcileeternality with causal efficacy. I conclude by arguing that if knowledge of God is possible, in virtue of His effects upon the world, then it is science that must play the preeminent role in producing that knowledge.

It has become something of a leitmotif among evangelical apologetes to argue that morality can have no objective foundation if there is no God. Using a strategy that appeals to many people's strong intuitions that there are objective rights and wrongs, they claim seek to convict atheists of being intellectually committed to moral relativism, subjectivism, or nihilism. Those are, of course, ethical positions that have been advocated by some atheists. But others share the intuition that there are objective moral norms, and also that we can, on the whole, come to know what they are.

This paper presents an argument for the claim that historical events are unique in a nontrivial sense which entails the inapplicability of the Hempelian D-N model to historical explanations. Some previous criticisms of Hempel are shown to be general criticisms of the D-N model which can be outflanked in cases where a reduction to fundamental laws is available. I then survey grounds for denying that explanations by reasons can be effectively reduced to causal explanations, and for rejecting methodological individualism. I conclude with some positive remarks concerning the structure of historical explanations and sense in which historical events are unique.

A popular proof for the existence of God assumes that there are objective moral duties, arguing that this can only be explained by there being a supreme law-giver, namely God. The upshot is either a Divine command theory (DCT) -- or something similar -- or a natural-law theory. I discuss two prominent theories, Robert Adams’s DCT and Stephen Evans’s hybrid DCT/natural-law theory. I argue that they suffer from fatal difficulties. Natural-law theories are plausible, if God exists, but can’t be used to prove His existence; and are less plausible, on the evidence, than a naturalistic natural-law theory, which has the best prospects for providing an objective foundation for morality