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113Kant's Panentheism: The Possibility Proof of 1763 and Its Fate in the Critical PeriodIn Ina Goy (ed.), Kant's Religious Arguments, De Gruyter. forthcoming.This chapter discusses Kant's 1763 "possibility proof" for the existence of God. I first provide a reconstruction of the proof in its two stages, and then revisit my earlier argument according to which the being the proof delivers threatens to be a Spinozistic-panentheistic God—a being whose properties include the entire spatio-temporal universe—rather than the traditional, ontologically distinct God of biblical monotheism. I go on to evaluate some recent alternative readings that have sought …Read more
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Hope but not Optimism: The Kantian Mind at the End of All ThingsIn Anna Ezekiel & Katerina Mihaylova (eds.), Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Philosophy, Bloomsbury. forthcoming.
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333Focus Theory of HopePhilosophical Quarterly 73 (1): 44-63. 2022.Most elpistologists now agree that hope for a specific outcome involves more than just desire plus the presupposition that the outcome is possible. This paper argues that the additional element of hope is a disposition to focus on the desired outcome in a certain way. I first survey the debate about the nature of hope in the recent literature, offer objections to some important competing accounts, and describe and defend the view that hope involves a kind of focus or attention. I then suggest th…Read more
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174Kant, Wood and Moral ArgumentsKantian Review 27 (1): 61-70. 2022.In this article I discuss the moral-coherence reading of Kant’s moral argument offered by Allen Wood in his recent book _Kant and Religion_, display some of the challenges that it faces and suggest that a moral-psychological formulation is preferable.
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206Knowledge, Anxiety, Hope: How Kant’s First and Third Questions Relate (Keynote address)In Beatrix Himmelmann & Camilla Serck-Hanssen (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th annual International Kant Congress, De Gruyter. pp. 127-149. 2021.
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116Philosophy of Religion in Modern European Thought 1600-1800The Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion. 2021.The early modern period (roughly, 1600–1800 ce) in Europe brought tremendous changes in intellectual, political, and cultural life. It was a period in which philosophical debates were inevitably bound up with questions about the nature and sources of religious truth. A chronological examination of some of the period’s major thinkers highlights two issues that were central to the development of philosophy of religion in the period. The first concerns the relations between God, the soul, and the b…Read more
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196Kantian Fallibilism: Knowledge, Certainty, DoubtMidwest Studies in Philosophy 45 99-128. 2021.For Kant, knowledge involves certainty. If “certainty” requires that the grounds for a given propositional attitude guarantee its truth, then this is an infallibilist view of epistemic justification. Such a view says you can’t have epistemic justification for an attitude unless the attitude is also true. Here I want to defend an alternative fallibilist interpretation. Even if a subject has grounds that would be sufficient for knowledge if the proposition were true, the proposition might not be t…Read more
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201Hope and Despair at the Kantian Chicken Factory: Moral Arguments about Making a DifferenceIn Lucy Allais & John J. Callanan (eds.), Kant and Animals, Oxford University Press. pp. 213-238. 2020.
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242Liturgical Philosophy of Religion: An Untimely Manifesto on Sincerity, Acceptance, and HopeIn M. David Eckel, Allen Speight & Troy DuJardin (eds.), The Future of the Philosophy of Religion, Springer. pp. 73-94. 2021.This loosely-argued manifesto contains some suggestions regarding what the philosophy of religion might become in the 21st century. It was written for a brainstorming workshop over a decade ago, and some of the recommendations and predictions it contains have already been partly actualized (that’s why it is now a bit "untimely"). The goal is to sketch three aspects of a salutary “liturgical turn” in philosophy of religion. (Note: “liturgy” here refers very broadly to communal religious service…Read more
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17Kant's Theory of Knowledge: An Analytical Introduction (review)Philosophical Review 116 (2): 307-309. 2007.
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39The Many Faces of Transcendental Realism: Willaschek on Kant’s DialecticKantian Review 25 (2): 279-293. 2020.After providing a brief overview of Marcus Willaschek's Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics, I critically reconstruct his account of ‘transcendental realism’ and the role that it plays in the dramatic narrative of the Critique of Pure Reason. I then lay out in detail how Willaschek generates and evaluates various versions of transcendental realism and raise some concerns about each. Next, I look at precisely how Willaschek's Kant thinks we can avoid applying the ‘supreme’ dialectical principle to…Read more
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8Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant's Moral and Religious PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 115 (1): 118-121. 2006.
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481Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, by Christine M. Korsgaard (review)Mind 130 (517): 363-373. 2020.A review of "Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals," by Christine M. Korsgaard. New York: Oxford, 2018. Pp. 271.
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223Can't Kant Cognize His Empirical Self? Or, a Problem for (almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of IdealismIn Anil Gomes & Andrew Stephenson (eds.), Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self, Oxford University Press. pp. 138-158. 2017.Kant seems to think of our own mental states or representations as the primary objects of inner sense. But does he think that these states also inhere in something? And, if so, is that something an empirical substance that is also cognized in inner sense? This chapter provides textual and philosophical grounds for thinking that, although Kant may agree with Hume that the self is not ‘given’ in inner sense exactly, he does think of the self as cognized through inner sense. It is also argued that …Read more
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582Noumenal Ignorance: Why, For Kant, Can't We Know Things in Themselves?In Matthew Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Kant, Palgrave Macmillan Uk. pp. 91-116. 2017.In this paper we look at a few of the most prominent ways of articulating Kant’s critical argument for Noumenal Ignorance — i.e., the claim that we cannot cognize or have knowledge of any substantive, synthetic truths about things-in-themselves — and then provide two different accounts of our own.
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203This is a talk given in honor of O'Neill at the Pacific APA when she won the Berggruen Prize in 2018.
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496Religious Dietary Practices and Secular Food Ethics; or, How to Hope that Your Food Choices Make a Difference Even When You Reasonably Believe That They Don'tIn Mark Budolfson, Anne Barnhill & Tyler Doggett (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics, Oxford University Press. 2018.Religious dietary practices foster a sense of communal identity, certainly, but traditionally they are also regarded as pleasing to God (or the gods, or the ancestors) and spiritually beneficial. In other words, for many religious people, the effects of fasting go well beyond what is immediately observed or empirically measurable, and that is a large part of what motivates participation in the practice. The goal of this chapter is to develop that religious way of thinking into a response to a mo…Read more
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237Can We Really Vote with our Forks? Opportunism and the Threshold ChickenIn Andrew Chignell, Matthew C. Halteman & Terence Cuneo (eds.), Philosophy Comes to Dinner, Routledge. pp. 182-202. 2016.
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240Kant's theory of causation and its eighteenth-century German backgroundPhilosophical Review 119 (4): 565-591. 2010.This critical notice highlights the important contributions that Eric Watkins's writings have made to our understanding of theories about causation developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy and by Kant in particular. Watkins provides a convincing argument that central to Kant's theory of causation is the notion of a real ground or causal power that is non-Humean (since it doesn't reduce to regularities or counterfactual dependencies among events or states) and non-Leibnizean because it d…Read more
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3228Religion and the SublimeIn Timothy M. Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, Cambridge University Press. pp. 183-202. 2012.Warning: includes two somewhat graphic images. This paper is an effort to lay out a taxomony of conceptual relations between the domains of the sublime and the religious.
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14Evil: A History (Oxford Philosophical Concepts) (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2019.Thirteen original essays examine the conceptual history of evil in the west: from ancient Hebrew literature and Greek drama to Darwinism and Holocaust theory. Thirteen reflections contextualize the philosophical developments by looking at evil through the eyes of animals, poets, mystics, witches, librettists, film directors, and tech executives.
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90Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments on the Ethics of Eating (edited book)Routledge. 2016.Everyone is talking about food. Chefs are celebrities. "Locavore" and "freegan" have earned spots in the dictionary. Popular books and films about food production and consumption are exposing the unintended consequences of the standard American diet. Questions about the principles and values that ought to guide decisions about dinner have become urgent for moral, ecological, and health-related reasons. In _Philosophy Comes to Dinner_, twelve philosophers—some leading voices, some inspiring new o…Read more
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368Ulrich Lehner, Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und -theologie , pp. 532 + ix, $139 (review)Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (1): 143-147. 2012.A review of Ulrich Lehner's recent book on Kant's philosophy of history.
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33Kant's Modal Metaphysics, by Nicholas Stang (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 16. 2016.A review of Nicholas Stang's 2016 book, Kant's Modal Metaphysics
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114God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion (Festschrift for Nicholas Wolterstorff) (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2005.Philosophy of religion in the Anglo-American tradition experienced a 'rebirth' following the 1955 publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology (eds. Antony Flew and Alisdair MacIntyre). Fifty years later, this volume of New Essays offers a sampling of the best work in what is now a very active field, written by some of its most prominent members. A substantial introduction sketches the developments of the last half-century, while also describing the 'ethics of belief' debate in epistemolo…Read more
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723Review: Saving God from Saving God (review)Books and Culture 15 (3). 2012.Mark Johnston’s book, Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2010) has two main goals, one negative and the other positive: (1) to eliminate the gods of the major Western monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as candidates for the role of “the Highest One”; (2) to introduce the real Highest One, a panentheistic deity worthy of devotion and capable of extending to us the grace needed to transform us from inwardly-turned sinners to practitioners of agape. In this review, we argue that Jo…Read more
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371The Devil, The Virgin, and the Envoy: Symbols of Moral Struggle in Religion II.2In Otfried Hoeffe (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen, Akademie Verlag. 2010.Part of a group commentary on Kant's Religion book.
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765Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, and CoherenceKant Studien 105 (4): 573-597. 2014.My goal in this paper is to show that Kant’s prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge of things-in-themselves is motivated less by his anti-soporific encounter with Hume than by his new view of the distinction between “real” and “logical” modality, a view that developed out of his reflection on the rationalist tradition in which he was trained. In brief: at some point in the 1770’s, Kant came to hold that a necessary condition on knowing a proposition is that one be able to prove that all the i…Read more
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1Kant's Ethics of Assent: Knowledge and Belief in the Critical PhilosophyDissertation, Yale University. 2004.Most accounts of Kant's epistemology focus narrowly on cognition and knowledge . Kant himself, however, thought that there are many other important species of assent : opinion, persuasion, conviction, belief, acceptance, and assent to the deliverances of common sense. ;My goal in this dissertation is to isolate and motivate the principles of rational acceptability which, for Kant, govern each of these kinds of assent, instead of focusing merely on cognition and knowledge. Some of the principles …Read more
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152Descartes on Sensation: A Defense of the Semantic-Causation ModelPhilosophers' Imprint 9 1-22. 2009.Descartes's lack of clarity about the causal connections between brain states and mental states has led many commentators to conclude that he has no coherent account of body-mind relations in sensation, or that he was simply confused about the issue. In this paper I develop what I take to be a coherent account that was available to Descartes, and argue that there are both textual and systematic reasons to think that it was his considered view. The account has brain states serving as occasions fo…Read more
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