•  836
    Judaism, Reincarnation, and Theodicy
    Faith and Philosophy 30 (4): 393-417. 2013.
    The doctrine of reincarnation is usually associated with Buddhism, Hinduism and other Eastern religions. But it has also been developed in Druzism and Judaism. The doctrine has been used by these traditions to explain the existence of evil within a moral order. Traversing the boundaries between East and West, we explore how Jewish mysticism has employed the doctrine to help answer the problem of evil. We explore the doctrine particularly as we respond to objections against employing it in a theo…Read more
  •  272
    Nicola Hoggard Creegan: Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil (review)
    Faith and Philosophy 33 (1): 125-127. 2016.
    Nicola Hoggard Creegan has written a thoughtful and subtle work on the challenge of natural evil to the life of faith in a post-Darwinian age. She contends that “the problem of evil will not be solved just by clever arguments, but also by our stance toward nature and toward God” (8). To this end, Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil is a work intended to help Christian believers recognize the God of love at work in the universe. Although some might be disappointed that Creegan does not attem…Read more
  •  186
    The Creation of Necessity
    Journal of Philosophical Investigations at University of Tabriz 9 (17): 153-171. 2015.
    In Descartes theological writing, he promotes two jointly puzzling theses: T1) God freely creates the eternal truths (i.e. the Creation Doctrine) and T2) The eternal truths are necessarily true. According to T1 God freely chooses which propositions to make necessary, contingent and possible. However the Creation Doctrine makes the acceptance of T2 tenuous for the Creation Doctrine implies that God could have acted otherwise--instantiating an entirely different set of necessary truths. Jonathan B…Read more
  •  92
    Some advocates of higher-order theories of consciousness believe that the correct theory of consciousness together with empirical facts about animal intelligence make it highly unlikely that animals are capable of having phenomenally conscious experiences. I will argue that even if the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness is correct, there is good evidence (taken from experiments in mind reading and metacognition, as well as considerations from neurophysiology and evolutionary biol…Read more
  •  3
    Comments on William Hannegan’s “Metaphysics-Laden Observation”
    Southwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 53-54. 2023.
  •  2
    Death
    In Graham Oppy (ed.), A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy, Wiley. 2019.
    I defend two major theses: (i) because the dead no longer exist, the dead cannot be harmed or wronged; and (ii) because the dead cannot be harmed or wronged, it is irrational to care about the future postmortem state of our reputations. I explain away common intuitions that the dead can be harmed by pointing to our ability to imagine ourselves in the place of a dead person. When we imagine ourselves in the place of a dead person, we exploit a third person perspective that is simply not available…Read more