•  265
    Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered.…Read more
  •  3
    Should You Eat Baby Yoda?
    In Jason T. Eberl & Kevin S. Decker (eds.), Star Wars and Philosophy Strikes Back, Wiley. 2023-01-09.
    Some moral sentimentalists say that ethical judgments just are our affective responses to the world and do not necessarily refer to or reflect anything beyond those emotional experiences. Moral sentimentalism tries to take seriously the psychological mechanisms that underwrite our making moral judgments. Moral sentimentalists treat feelings, or affective attitudes, as important components of moral theorizing and decision‐making. Fortunately, moral sentimentalists have a better option for measuri…Read more
  • Complex Question
    In Robert Arp, Steven Barbone & Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad Arguments, Wiley. 2018-05-09.
    This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'complex question (CQ)'. The fallacy of the CQ appears in two varieties. The implicit form distracts an interlocutor by assuming the truth of an unproven premise and shifting the focus of the argument in an unfounded direction. While the explicit form collapses two distinct questions into a single question such that a single answer would appear to satisfy both inquiries. The possibility that an undetected CQ might l…Read more
  •  2
    Chronological Snobbery
    In Robert Arp, Steven Barbone & Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad Arguments, Wiley. 2018-05-09.
    This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: chronological snobbery (CS). First described by the Christian academic Owen Barfield in the 1920s and later popularized by his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, the fallacy of CS presupposes that cultural, philosophical, or scientific ideas from later time periods are necessarily superior to those from earlier ages. Grounded on the Enlightenment's concept of “progress”, this informal fallacy stems from the assumption that …Read more
  •  11
    Comments on “Is Annihilation More Severe than Eternal Conscious Torment?”
    Southwest Philosophy Review 38 (2): 43-45. 2022.
  •  203
    “Teach Me To Do What’s Right”: Faith, Hope, and Love as Post-Religious Virtues
    Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 20 (3). 2021.
    According to Thomas Aquinas, what distinguishes the theological from the cardinal virtues is the nature of their object: the latter aim at the natural excellence of humans, while the former direct us beyond ourselves to focus on the Divine. This paper considers the cinematic work of Drew Goddard — in particular, his 2018 film _Bad Times at the El Royale_ — as a post-religious response to Aquinas, insofar as it retains and re-presents Faith, Hope, and Love as valuable elements of the human experi…Read more
  •  608
    On Superhero Stories: The Marvel Cinematic Universe as Tolkienesque Fantasy
    Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 36 (2). 2018.
    By considering the movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a case study, I bring Tolkien’s explication of mythopoesis in “On Fairy Stories” to bear on the current popularity of superhero films to argue that such works qualify as cinematic examples of Tolkienesque fantasy tales. After summarizing Tolkien’s criteria for the genre in Nietzschean aesthetic terms, I both demonstrate how the builders of the MCU have crafted a sub-created fictional world and defend the existence of fairy stories in …Read more
  •  810
    Although Disney films are sometimes denigrated as popular or “low” art forms, this article argues that they often engage deeply with, and thereby communicate, significant moral truths. The capitalistic enterprise of contemporary modern cinema demands that cinematic moral pedagogy be sublimated into non-partisan forms, often by substituting secular proxies for otherwise divine or spiritual components. By adapting Søren Kierkegaard’s tripartite existential anthropology of the self, I analyze the s…Read more
  •  64
    Is Heaven a Zoopolis?
    Faith and Philosophy 37 (4). 2020.
    The concept of service found in Christian theism and related religious perspectives offers robust support for a political defense of nonhuman animal rights, both in the eschaton and in the present state. By adapting the political theory defended by Donaldson and Kymlicka to contemporary theological models of the afterlife and of human agency, I defend a picture of heaven as a harmoniously structured society where humans are the functional leaders of a multifaceted, interspecies citizenry. Conse…Read more
  •  10
  •  1041
    Divine Energies: The Consuming Fire and the Beatific Vision
    TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 2 (2). 2018.
    I argue that a comprehensive ontological assessment of the beatific vision suggests that an individual’s experience of God’s face is not merely dependent on a revelation of the divine energies, but that it requires a particular mode of reception on the part of the blessed individual grounded in the reality of their faith; lacking faith, what would otherwise be experienced as the blessed vision of God is instead received as a torturous punishment. Therefore, I contend that the beatific vision is …Read more
  •  578
    The Agony of the Infinite: The Presence of God as Phenomenological Hell
    In Simon Cushing (ed.), Heaven and Philosophy, Lexington Books. pp. 119-135. 2017.
    Much recent academic literature on the afterlife has been focused on the justice of eternity and whether a good God could allow a person to experience eternal suffering in Hell. Two primary escapes are typically suggested to justify never-ending punishment for sinners: the traditional view focuses the blame for an individual’s condemnation away from God onto the sinner’s freely chosen actions; the universalist position denies the eternality of the punishment on the grounds that God’s inescapable…Read more
  •  772
    Speciesistic Veganism: An Anthropocentric Argument
    In Jodey Castricano & Rasmus R. Simonsen (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Veganism, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 41-66. 2016.
    The paper proposes an anthropocentric argument for veganism based on a speciesistic premise that most carnists likely affirm: human flourishing should be promoted. I highlight four areas of human suffering promoted by a carnistic diet: (1) health dangers to workers (both physical and psychological), (2) economic dangers to workers, (3) physical dangers to communities around slaughterhouses, and (4) environmental dangers to communities-at-large. Consequently, one could ignore the well-being of no…Read more
  •  426
    Pursuing Pankalia: The Aesthetic Theodicy of St. Augustine
    In Benjamin McCraw & Robert Arp (eds.), The Problem of Evil: New Philosophical Directions, Lexington Books. pp. 69-83. 2016.
    This chapter summarizes Augustine’s often-neglected aesthetic theodicy that balances his metaphysical definitions of evil and human agency against the ultimately beautiful story Augustine sees God, as the author of all Creation, writing. First, Augustine’s neo-Platonic conception of evil as the “privation of goodness” is explained which effectively eliminates much of the apparent evil in the world under the guise of a preeminent God’s loving care of the Creation which He fashions as good, but is…Read more
  •  264
    This paper assesses the aesthetic components of the experience of forgiveness to develop a procedural model of the phenomenological process that negotiates cognitive judgments and understanding with emotional affective states. By bringing the Greek concepts of kalokagathia and eudaimonia into conversation with Ricoeur’s “solicitude,” I suggest that the impetus for engaging in the process of forgiveness is best understood narratively as the pursuit of a life well lived (in terms of beauty). Conse…Read more
  •  442
    The Pig’s Squeak: Towards a Renewed Aesthetic Argument for Veganism
    Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 29 (4): 631-642. 2016.
    In 1906, Henry Stephens Salt published a short collection of essays that presented several rhetorically powerful, if formally deficient arguments for the vegetarian position. By interpreting Salt as a moral sentimentalist with ties to Aristotelian virtue ethics, I propose that his aesthetic argument deserves contemporary consideration. First, I connect ethics and aesthetics with the Greek concepts of kalon and kalokagathia that depend equally on beauty and morality before presenting Salt’s asser…Read more