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3693Human beings among the beastsPacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (3): 455-467. 2021.In this article, we develop and defend a new argument for animalism -- the thesis that we human persons are human animals. The argument takes this rough form: since our pets are animals, we are too. We’ll begin with remarks on animalism and its rivals, develop our main argument, and then defend it against a few replies.
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623The Hume-Edwards principle and the cosmological argumentInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (3): 149-165. 1998.
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586Nestes Modes, ’Qua’ and the IncarnationEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (2): 65--80. 2014.A nested mode ontology allows one to make sense of apparently contradictory Christological claims such as that Christ knows everything and there are some things Christ does not know.
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535Being Sure and Being Confident That You Won’t Lose ConfidenceLogos and Episteme 7 (1): 45-54. 2016.There is an important sense in which one can be sure without being certain, i.e., without assigning unit probability. I will offer an explication of this sense of sureness, connecting it with the level of credence that a rational agent would need to have to be confident that she won’t ever lose her confidence. A simple formal result then gives us an explicit formula connecting the threshold α for credence needed for confidence with the threshold needed for being sure: one needs 1−(1−α) to be sur…Read more
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507A new cosmological argumentReligious Studies 35 (4): 461-476. 1999.We will give a new cosmological argument for the existence of a being who, although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists, also is capable of playing the role in the lives of working theists of a being that is a suitable object of worship, adoration, love, respect, and obedience. Unlike the absolutely perfect God, the God whose necessary existence is established by our argument will not be shown to essentially have the divine perfections of omnipotence, omnisc…Read more
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498Agodelian ontological argument improved even moreIn Miroslaw Szatkowski (ed.), Ontological Proofs Today, Ontos Verlag. pp. 50--203. 2012.
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491Understanding OmnipotenceReligious Studies 48 (3): 403-414. 2012.An omnipotent being would be a being whose power was unlimited. The power of human beings is limited in two distinct ways: we are limited with respect to our freedom of will, and we are limited in our ability to execute what we have willed. These two distinct sources of limitation suggest a simple definition of omnipotence: an omnipotent being is one that has both perfect freedom of will and perfect efficacy of will. In this paper we further explicate this definition and show that it escapes the…Read more
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422Skepticism and the principle of sufficient reasonPhilosophical Studies 178 (4): 1079-1099. 2020.The Principle of Sufficient Reason must be justified dialectically: by showing the disastrous consequences of denying it. We formulate a version of the Principle that is restricted to basic natural facts, which entails the obtaining of at least one supernatural fact. Denying this principle results in extreme empirical skepticism. We consider six current theories of empirical knowledge, showing that on each account we cannot know that we have empirical knowledge unless we all have a priori knowle…Read more
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385Probability, Regularity, and CardinalityPhilosophy of Science 80 (2): 231-240. 2013.Regularity is the thesis that all contingent propositions should be assigned probabilities strictly between zero and one. I will prove on cardinality grounds that if the domain is large enough, a regular probability assignment is impossible, even if we expand the range of values that probabilities can take, including, for instance, hyperreal values, and significantly weaken the axioms of probability.
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330The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A ReassessmentCambridge University Press. 2006.The Principle of Sufficient Reason says that all contingent facts must have explanation. In this 2006 volume, which was the first on the topic in the English language in nearly half a century, Alexander Pruss examines the substantive philosophical issues raised by the Principle Reason. Discussing various forms of the PSR and selected historical episodes, from Parmenides, Leibnez, and Hume, Pruss defends the claim that every true contingent proposition must have an explanation against major objec…Read more
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298The Leibnizian Cosmological ArgumentIn William Lane Craig & J. P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Wiley‐blackwell. 2009.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The PSR Nonlocal CPs Toward a First Cause The Gap Problem Conclusions and Further Research References.
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294Might All Infinities Be the Same Size?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (3): 604-617. 2020.Cantor proved that no set has a bijection between itself and its power set. This is widely taken to have shown that there infinitely many sizes of infinite sets. The argument depends on the princip...
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292A response to Oppy, and to Davey and CliftonReligious Studies 38 (1): 89-99. 2002.Our paper ‘A new cosmological argument’ gave an argument for the existence of God making use of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR) which states that for every proposition p, if p is true, then it is possible that there is an explanation for p. Recently, Graham Oppy, as well as Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton, have criticized the argument. We reply to these criticisms. The most interesting kind of criticism in both papers alleges that the W-PSR can be justifiably denied by the atheist, a…Read more
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291Not Out of Lust but in Accordance with Truth: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Sexuality and RealityLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6 (4): 51-80. 2003.
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278Incompatibilism provedCanadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 430-437. 2013.(2013). Incompatibilism proved. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. ???aop.label???
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241A gödelian ontological argument improvedReligious Studies 45 (3): 347-353. 2009.Gödel's ontological argument is a formal argument for a being defined in terms of the concept of a positive property. I shall defend several versions of Gödel's argument, using weaker premises than Anderson's (1990) version, and avoiding Oppy's (1996 and 2000) parody refutations
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206A Counterexample to Plantinga’s Free Will DefenseFaith and Philosophy 29 (4): 400-415. 2012.Plantinga’s Free Will Defense is an argument that, possibly, God cannot actualize a world containing significant creaturely free will and no wrongdoings. I will argue that if standard Molinism is true, there is a pair of worlds w1 and w2 each of which contains a significantly free creature who never chooses wrongly, and that are such that, necessarily, at least one of these worlds is a world that God can actualize.
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190David Lewis’s Counterfactual Arrow of TimeNoûs 37 (4). 2003.David Lewis (1979) has argued that according to his possible worlds analysis of counterfactuals, “backtracking” counterfactuals of the form “If event A were to happen at tA, then event B would happen at tB” where tB precedes tA, are usually false if B does not actually happen at tB. On the other..
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189The cardinality objection to David Lewis's modal realismPhilosophical Studies 104 (2): 169-178. 2001.According to David Lewis's extreme modal realism, every waythat a world could be is a way that some concretely existingphysical world really is. But if the worlds are physicalentities, then there should be a set of all worlds, whereasI show that in fact the collection of all possible worlds is nota set. The latter conclusion remains true even outside of theLewisian framework.
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184Infinitesimals are too small for countably infinite fair lotteriesSynthese 191 (6): 1051-1057. 2014.We show that infinitesimal probabilities are much too small for modeling the individual outcome of a countably infinite fair lottery
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180Possibility is not consistencyPhilosophical Studies 172 (9): 2341-2348. 2015.We shall use Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem to show that consistency is not possibility, and then argue that the argument does serious damage to some theories of modality where consistency plays a major but not exclusive role
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179OmnirationalityRes Philosophica 90 (1): 1-21. 2013.God is omnirational: whenever he does anything, he does it for all and only the unexcluded reasons that favor the action, and he always acts for reasons. Thisdoctrine has two unexpected consequences: it gives an account of why it is that unification is a genuine form of scientific explanation, and it answers the question of when the occurrence of E after a petitionary prayer for E is an answer to the prayer
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172Another Step in Divine Command DialecticsFaith and Philosophy 26 (4): 432-439. 2009.Consider the following three-step dialectics. (1) Even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong. Therefore Divine Command Metaethics (DCM) is false. (2) No: for it is impossible for God to command torture of the innocent. (3) Even if it is impossible, there is a non-trivially true per impossibile counterfactual that even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong, and this counterfactual is incompatible with DCM. I s…Read more
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172The Eucharist : real presence and real absenceIn Thomas P. Flint & Michael Rea (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophical theology, Oxford University Press. 2008.This article focuses on the question of whether the doctrine of the real presence of Christ's body and blood, and likewise the doctrine of the real absence of bread and wine, can be defended philosophically. It argues for an affirmative answer, and does so by considering a variety of metaphysical models, including that of Aquinas. It will appear, thus, that transubstantiation is a philosophical possibility. If it is possible for two substances to be in the same place at the same time, consubstan…Read more
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167The accomplishment of plans: a new version of the principle of double effectPhilosophical Studies 165 (1): 49-69. 2013.The classical principle of double effect offers permissibility conditions for actions foreseen to lead to evil outcomes. I shall argue that certain kinds of closeness cases, as well as general heuristic considerations about the order of explanation, lead us to replace the intensional concept of intention with the extensional concept of accomplishment in double effect
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164Review of Graham Oppy, Arguing About Gods (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (5). 2007.
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158Conditional probabilitiesAnalysis 72 (3): 488-491. 2012.A simple argument is given that shows that conditional probabilities do not supervene on unconditional probabilities. In particular, one cannot in general define conditional probabilities using the ratio formula P ( U | V ) = P ( U & V )/ P ( U ), or using any more sophisticated method based on unconditional probabilities
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153Fine- and Coarse-Tuning, Normalizability, and Probabilistic ReasoningPhilosophia Christi 7 (2). 2005.McGrew, McGrew and Vestrup (MMV) have argued that the fine-tuning anthropic principle argument for the existence of God fails because no probabilities can be assigned to the likelihood that physical constants fall in some finite interval. In particular, the fine-tuning argument that, say, some constant must lie in the range (1.000,1.001) in order for intelligent life to be possible is no better than a seemingly absurd coarse-tuning argument based on the need for that constant to lie in the range…Read more