Aaron D. Cobb

Auburn University At Montgomery
  •  2
    Mill's Philosophy of Science
    In Christopher Macleod & Dale E. Miller (eds.), A Companion to Mill, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. 2016.
    John Stuart Mill's System of Logic was a significant early work in the history of the philosophy of science. The goal of this essay is to characterize Mill's views concerning the central purposes of the sciences and the methods that give to scientific inquiry its distinctive quality and power. More broadly, this chapter explores the implications of Mill's philosophy of science for important debates concerning the nature of inductivism and the normativity of scientific practice in the constructio…Read more
  •  46
    The Theological Virtue of Hope as a Social Virtue
    with Adam Green
    Journal of Analytic Theology 5 230-250. 2017.
    Analyses of the theological virtue of hope tend to focus on its interior dispositional structure, shifting attention away from the social dimensions crucial to its formation and exercise. We argue that one can better appreciate the place of hope in Christian thought by attending to communal features that have been peripheral to or excluded from traditional analyses. To this end, we employ resources from the literature on the extended mind and group agency to develop an account of the theological…Read more
  •  55
    Disability and the Theodicy of Defeat
    Journal of Analytic Theology 5 100-120. 2017.
    Marilyn McCord Adams argues that God’s goodness to individuals requires God to defeat horrendous evils; it is not enough for God to outweigh these evils through compensatory goods. On her view, God defeats the evils experienced by an individual if and only if God’s goodness to the individual enables her to integrate the evil organically into a unified life story she perceives as good and meaningful. In this essay, we seek to apply Adams’s theodicy of defeat to a particular form of suffering. We …Read more
  •  4
    Perinatal hospice is a novel form of care for an unborn child who has been diagnosed with a significantly life-limiting condition. In this book, Aaron D. Cobb develops a virtue-based defense of the value of perinatal hospice. He characterizes its promotion and provision as a common project of individuals, local communities, and institutions working together to provide exemplary care. Engaging with important themes from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Adams, he shows how perinatal hospi…Read more
  •  10
    Christian Humility and the Goods of Perinatal Hospice
    Christian Bioethics 27 (1): 69-83. 2021.
    Perinatal palliative and hospice care (hereafter, perinatal hospice) is a novel approach to addressing a family’s varied needs following an adverse in utero diagnosis. Christian defenses of perinatal hospice tend to focus on its role as an ethical alternative to abortion. Although these analyses are important, they do not provide adequate grounds to characterize the wide range of goods realized through this compassionate form of care. This essay draws on an analysis of the Christian virtue of hu…Read more
  •  30
    Hope for intellectual humility
    Episteme 16 (1): 56-72. 2019.
  •  21
    Is John F. W. Herschel an Inductivist about Hypothetical Inquiry?
    Perspectives on Science 20 (4): 409-439. 2012.
    John Herschel's discussion of hypotheses in the Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy has generated questions concerning his commitment to the principle that hypothetical speculation is legitimate only if warranted by inductive evidence. While Herschel explicitly articulates an inductivist philosophy of science, he also asserts that “it matters little how {a hypothesis or theory} has been originally framed” when it can withstand extensive testing and empirical scrutiny. This evidence has c…Read more
  •  1305
    William Whewell raised a series of objections concerning John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science which suggested that Mill’s views were not properly informed by the history of science or by adequate reflection on scientific practices. The aim of this paper is to revisit and evaluate this incisive Whewellian criticism of Mill’s views by assessing Mill’s account of Michael Faraday’s discovery of electrical induction. The historical evidence demonstrates that Mill’s reconstruction is an inadequate…Read more
  •  39
    The Silence of God and the Theological Virtue of Hope
    Res Philosophica 94 (1): 23-41. 2017.
    Hope is crucial human agency, but its fragility grounds a substantive challenge to Christian belief. It is not clear how a perfectly loving God could permit despairinducing experiences of divine silence. Drawing upon a distinctively Christian psychology of hope, this paper seeks to address this challenge. I contend that divine silence can act as a corrective to misplaced natural hopes. But there are risks in God’s choice to allow a person to lose all natural hope. Thus, if God is perfectly lovin…Read more
  •  23
    Hope and the Problem of Divine Silence
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4): 157--178. 2016.
    The silence of God either by itself or in circumstances of profound suffering can induce hopelessness and despair, eroding a person’s ability to act in ways conducive to her own good. Given the role of hope in human agency, the loss of hope is an event of a significant moral and personal concern. And the standard responses to the problem of divine hiddenness may not address the existential crises occasioned by God’s silence. This paper seeks to develop and address this challenge by evaluating tw…Read more
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  •  33
    Acknowledged Dependence and the Virtues of Perinatal Hospice
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 41 (1): 25-40. 2015.
    Prenatal screening can lead to the detection and diagnosis of significantly life-limiting conditions affecting the unborn child. Recognizing the difficulties facing parents who decide to continue the pregnancy, some have proposed perinatal hospice as a new modality of care. Although the medical literature has begun to devote significant attention to these practices, systematic philosophical reflection on perinatal hospice has been relatively limited. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of th…Read more
  •  25
    Inductivism in Practice: Experiment in John Herschel’s Philosophy of Science
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2 (1): 21-54. 2012.
    The aim of this work is to elucidate John F. W. Herschel’s distinctive contribution to nineteenth-century British inductivism by exploring his understanding of experimental methods. Drawing on both his explicit discussion of experiment in his Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy and his published account of experiments he conducted in the domain of electromagnetism, I argue that the most basic principle underlying Herschel’s epistemology of experiment is that experiment enables a particul…Read more
  •  130
    While epistemic justification is a central concern for both contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science, debates in contemporary epistemology about the nature of epistemic justification have not been discussed extensively by philosophers of science. As a step toward a coherent account of scientific justification that is informed by, and sheds light on, justificatory practices in the sciences, this paper examines one of these debates—the internalist-externalist debate—from the perspective…Read more
  •  81
    Hope as an Intellectual Virtue?
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (3): 269-285. 2015.
    Hope is a ubiquitous feature of human experience, but there has been relatively little scholarship within contemporary analytic philosophy devoted to the systematic analysis of its nature and value. In the last decade, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the study of hope and, in particular, its role in human agency. This scholarly attention reflects an ambivalence about hope's effects. While the possession of hope can have salutary consequences, it can also make the agent vulner…Read more