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19On the “content” and “relevance” of information-theoretic epistemologyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (1): 79-81. 1983.
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52Moral Relativism, Cognitivism and Defeasible RulesSocial Philosophy and Policy 11 (1): 116-138. 1994.Naturalism rejects a sui generis and fundamental realm of the evaluative or normative. Thought and talk about the good and the right must hence be understood without appeal to any such evaluative or normative concepts or properties. In Sections I and II, we see noncognitivism step forward with its account of evaluative and normative language as fundamentally optative or prescriptive. Prescriptivism falls afoul of several problems. Prominent among them below is the “problem of prima facie reasons…Read more
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19Vincent A. Tomas 1916-1995Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 69 (5). 1996.
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12Essays on the Philosophy of George Berkeley (edited book)D. Reidel. 1986.A tercentenary conference of March, 1985, drew to Newport, Rhode Island, nearly all the most distinguished Berkeley scholars now active. The conference was organized by the International Berkeley Society, with the support of several institutions and many people. This volume represents a selection of the lead papers deliv ered at that conference, most now revised. The Cartesian marriage of Mind and Body has proved an uneasy union. Each side has claimed supremacy and usurped the rights of the othe…Read more
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Consciousness of the Self and the PresentIn James Tomberlin (ed.), Agent, Language and the Structure of the World, Hackett Publishing Company. pp. 131-47. 1983.
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12External realism and philosophy in transitionJournal of Social Philosophy 22 (1): 183-186. 1991.This paper was written for a panel session, in which I was asked to represent an analytic perspective. On reflection I found that there is no such thing, however, and that what best unifies the analytic traditions is not even a set of questions, much less a set of answers, but only agreement on certain standards of clarity and argumentation, and an interest in dialectic and debate. Certain issues have long dominated the analytic agenda, it is true, and I see no better way to represent an analyti…Read more
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78Situations against virtues : the situationist attack on virtue theoryIn Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, Cambridge University Press. pp. 274--290. 2009.
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191Metaphysics: An Anthology, 2nd Edition (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2011.Thoroughly updated, the second edition of this highly successful textbook continues to represent the most comprehensive and authoritative collection of canonical readings in metaphysics. In addition to updated material from the first edition, it presents entirely new sections on ontology and the metaphysics of material objects.
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31Roderick Milton Chisholm 1916-1999Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 72 (5). 1999.
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87The essentials of personsDialectica 53 (3-4): 227-41. 1999.This paper tries to clarify the nature of philosophical questions as to the ontological nature of things, especially persons. It considers implications of an Aristotelian account, which leads to an ontology that makes subjects and other things epistemologically remote. This makes the account doubtfully reconcilable with the special epistemic relation that each of us has to oneself, via for example the cogito.
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7Philosophical Issues, Action TheoryWiley-Blackwell. 2012.This is a collection of papers on action theory, very broadly conceived. It contains cutting-edge work by some of the most important contributors in the field
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971For the Love of Truth?In Linda Zagzebski & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 49-62. 2000.Rational beings pursue and value truth . Intellectual conduct is to be judged, accordingly, by how well it aids our pursuit of that ideal. I ask whether these platitudes mean, and whether they are true.
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331Rational intuition: Bealer on its nature and epistemic statusPhilosophical Studies 81 (2-3): 151--162. 1996.A discussion of George Bealer's conception and defense of rational intuition as a basis of philosophical knowledge, under three main heads: a) the phenomenology of intellectual intuition; b) the status of such intuition as a basic source of evidence, and the explanation of what gives it that status; and c) the defense of intuition against those who would reject it and exclude it on principle from the set of valid sources of evidence.
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234Knowledge and Intellectual VirtueThe Monist 68 (2): 226-245. 1985.An intellectual virtue is a quality bound to help maximize one’s surplus of truth over error; or so let us assume for now, though a more just conception may include as desiderata also generality, coherence, and explanatory power, unless the value of these is itself explained as derivative from the character of their contribution precisely to one’s surplus of truth over error. This last is an issue I mention in order to lay it aside. Here we assume only a teleological conception of intellectual v…Read more
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60A Virtue Epistemology: Volume I: Apt Belief and Reflective KnowledgeOxford University Press UK. 2007.A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and scepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties of s…Read more
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17Experience and the Objects of Perception (review)Review of Metaphysics 39 (1): 142-144. 1985.This study aims primarily at an account of sensory experience and perception uncommitted to objectual sense data or sense impressions. In the end it does make room for sense impressions, but only as entities somehow abstracted from phenomenological attention to sense experience. The "phenomenological standpoint" is attained by imagining "that a transparent screen has been placed at right angles about three feet from your eyes between you and all the objects before you," and by imagining further …Read more
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853A defense of the use of intuitions in philosophyIn Michael Bishop & Dominic Murphy (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Blackwell. pp. 101--112. 2009.
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3Skepticism and the internal/external divideIn John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 145--57. 1999.
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44De re belief, action explanations, and the essential indexicalIn Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman & Nicholas Asher (eds.), Modality, morality, and belief: essays in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus, Cambridge University Press. pp. 235--249. 1995.
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11Reliability andIn Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility, Oxford University Press. pp. 369. 2002.