•  19
    The Cosmos as a Work of Art
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 94 205-213. 2020.
    I shall defend Augustine’s holistic aesthetic response to the problem of evil by considering the variety of ways in which our vision of the cosmos is limited and how this is similar to the kinds of limitations on viewing a work of art that would make negative criticism unreasonable. At the same time, I identify an interesting asymmetry: we may be justified in making positive, but not negative, judgments about the creator’s skill on the basis of a mere partial perception.
  •  70
    Human organisms begin to exist at fertilization
    Bioethics 31 (7): 534-542. 2017.
    Eugene Mills has recently argued that human organisms cannot begin to exist at fertilization because the evidence suggests that egg cells persist through fertilization and simply turn into zygotes. He offers two main arguments for this conclusion: that ‘fertilized egg’ commits no conceptual fallacy, and that on the face of it, it looks as though egg cells survive fertilization when the process is watched through a microscope. We refute these arguments and offer several reasons of our own to thin…Read more
  •  13
    1. Really Statistical Explanations and Genetic Drift Really Statistical Explanations and Genetic Drift (pp. 169-188)
    with Marc Lange, Peter Vickers, John Michael, Miles MacLeod, David John Baker, Clark Glymour, and Simon Fitzpatrick
    Philosophy of Science 80 (2): 169-188. 2013.
    Really statistical explanation is a hitherto neglected form of noncausal scientific explanation. Explanations in population biology that appeal to drift are RS explanations. An RS explanation supplies a kind of understanding that a causal explanation of the same result cannot supply. Roughly speaking, an RS explanation shows the result to be mere statistical fallout.
  •  466
    Understanding Omnipotence
    Religious 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
  •  16
    The dialectics of accuracy arguments for probabilism
    Synthese 201 (5): 1-26. 2023.
    Scoring rules measure the deviation between a credence assignment and reality. Probabilism holds that only those credence assignments that satisfy the axioms of probability are rationally admissible. Accuracy-based arguments for probabilism observe that given certain conditions on a scoring rule, the score of any non-probability is dominated by the score of a probability. The conditions in the arguments we will consider include propriety: the claim that the expected accuracy of _p_ is not beaten…Read more
  •  19
    Strict dominance and symmetry
    Philosophical Studies 180 (3): 1017-1029. 2023.
    The strict dominance principle that a wager always paying better than another is rationally preferable is one of the least controversial principles in decision theory. I shall show that (given the Axiom of Choice) there is a contradiction between strict dominance and plausible isomorphism or symmetry conditions, by showing how in several natural cases one can construct isomorphic wagers one of which strictly dominates the other. In particular, I will show that there is a pair of wagers on the ou…Read more
  •  19
    Scoring rules measure the deviation between a forecast, which assigns degrees of confidence to various events, and reality. Strictly proper scoring rules have the property that for any forecast, the mathematical expectation of the score of a forecast p by the lights of p is strictly better than the mathematical expectation of any other forecast q by the lights of p. Forecasts need not satisfy the axioms of the probability calculus, but Predd et al. [9] have shown that given a finite sample space…Read more
  •  25
    Scoring rules measure the accuracy or epistemic utility of a credence assignment. A significant literature uses plausible conditions on scoring rules on finite sample spaces to argue for both probabilism—the doctrine that credences ought to satisfy the axioms of probabilism—and for the optimality of Bayesian update as a response to evidence. I prove a number of formal results regarding scoring rules on infinite sample spaces that impact the extension of these arguments to infinite sample spaces.…Read more
  •  12
    A serious error in the proof of a recent characterization of the existence of full conditional probabilities invariant under symmetries is corrected.
  •  24
    Bayesian epistemology has struggled with the problem of regularity: how to deal with events that in classical probability have zero probability. While the cases most discussed in the literature, such as infinite sequences of coin tosses or continuous spinners, do not actually come up in scientific practice, there are cases that do come up in science. I shall argue that these cases can be resolved without leaving the realm of classical probability, by choosing a probability measure that preserves…Read more
  •  45
    Non-classical probabilities invariant under symmetries
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 8507-8532. 2021.
    Classical real-valued probabilities come at a philosophical cost: in many infinite situations, they assign the same probability value—namely, zero—to cases that are impossible as well as to cases that are possible. There are three non-classical approaches to probability that can avoid this drawback: full conditional probabilities, qualitative probabilities and hyperreal probabilities. These approaches have been criticized for failing to preserve intuitive symmetries that can be preserved by the …Read more
  •  3672
    Human beings among the beasts
    Pacific 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.
  •  30
    Counseling Lesser and Proportionate Evils
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 92 151-160. 2018.
    It is widely thought that it can be permissible to persuade someone set on a greater evil to commit a lesser evil instead, though the question is not without controversy. I argue that a version of this kind of Principle of Counseling Lesser Evil can be derived from the Principle of Double Effect and some considerations about the way human choices work. As an application, I argue that giving bribes to officials who otherwise would not do their job might be considered a special case of this counse…Read more
  •  37
    Avoiding Dutch Books despite inconsistent credences
    Synthese 198 (12): 11265-11289. 2020.
    It is often loosely said that Ramsey The foundations of mathematics and other logical essays, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Abingdon, pp 156–198, 1931) and de Finetti Studies in subjective probability, Kreiger Publishing, Huntington, 1937) proved that if your credences are inconsistent, then you will be willing to accept a Dutch Book, a wager portfolio that is sure to result in a loss. Of course, their theorems are true, but the claim about acceptance of Dutch Books assumes a particular method of ca…Read more
  •  381
    Skepticism and the principle of sufficient reason
    Philosophical 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
  •  2
    Divine Creative Freedom
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7 213-238. 2016.
  •  70
    On Christian Theism and Unrestricted Composition
    with Ross Inman
    American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4): 345-360. 2019.
    Our aim in this paper is to bring to light two sources of tension for Christian theists who endorse the principle of unrestricted composition, that necessarily, for any objects, the xs, there exists an object, y, such that the xs compose y. In Value, we argue that a composite object made of wholly valuable parts is at least as valuable as its most valuable part, and so the mereological sum of God and a wholly valuable part would be at least as valuable as God; but Christian theism arguably deman…Read more
  •  274
    Might 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...
  •  46
    Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities without Triviality
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 60 (3): 551-558. 2019.
    The Adams Thesis holds for a conditional → and a probability assignment P if and only if P=P whenever P>0. The restriction ensures that P is well defined by the classical formula P=P/P. Drawing on deep results of Maharam on measure algebras, it is shown that, notwithstanding well-known triviality results, any probability space can be extended to a probability space with a new conditional satisfying the Adams Thesis and satisfying a number of axioms for conditionals. This puts significant limits …Read more
  •  4
    Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 55 (4): 873-874. 2002.
    Rescher is one of the very few contemporary philosophers offering an all-encompassing system. Here, with Rescher’s famous clarity, we have an exposition of much of this unique system in the course of an investigation into how much hope we can have for a systematic scientifically informed understanding of nature.
  •  54
    Other Times: Philosophical Perspectives on Past, Present and Future (review)
    Dialogue 39 (1): 199-201. 2000.
    There is a basic dividing line in the philosophy of time. According to the B-theory, we can describe the temporal reality of the world with freely repeatable sentences, using designators of fixed times and relations such as "earlier" and "later." The A-theory contends that there is an ontological feature of the world which is described by explicitly tensed statements such as "I am now writing this review," and which is not captured by any B-theoretic statements such as "I write this review at t1…Read more
  •  88
    Underdetermination of infinitesimal probabilities
    Synthese 198 (1): 777-799. 2018.
    A number of philosophers have attempted to solve the problem of null-probability possible events in Bayesian epistemology by proposing that there are infinitesimal probabilities. Hájek and Easwaran have argued that because there is no way to specify a particular hyperreal extension of the real numbers, solutions to the regularity problem involving infinitesimals, or at least hyperreal infinitesimals, involve an unsatisfactory ineffability or arbitrariness. The arguments depend on the alleged imp…Read more
  •  56
    Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
    Philosophia Christi 7 (1): 209-213. 2005.
  •  42
    Infinity, Causation, and Paradox
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Alexander R. Pruss examines a large family of paradoxes to do with infinity - ranging from deterministic supertasks to infinite lotteries and decision theory. Having identified their common structure, Pruss considers at length how these paradoxes can be resolved by embracing causal finitism.
  •  2
    PSR and Probabilities
    Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 10. 2017.
  •  93
    Necessary Existence
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defence of the hypothesis that there is a necessarily existing being capable of providing an ultimate foundation for the existence of all things.
  •  115
    Correction to John D. Norton “How to build an infinite lottery machine”
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (1): 143-144. 2018.
    An infinite lottery machine is used as a foil for testing the reach of inductive inference, since inferences concerning it require novel extensions of probability. Its use is defensible if there is some sense in which the lottery is physically possible, even if exotic physics is needed. I argue that exotic physics is needed and describe several proposals that fail and at least one that succeeds well enough.