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1Ethics as Grammar: Changing the Postmodern SubjectUniversity of Notre Dame Press. 2001.This text uses the work of ethicist Stanley Hauerwas as a foil for showing how Wittgenstein's method can become concrete in the Christian tradition. It shows that Wittgenstein's aim to cultivate concrete skill in people was akin to Aristotle's emphasis on the relationship of reason and ethics.
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15Wittgensteinian Fideism? – By Kai Nielsen and D. Z. Phillips: REVIEWSModern Theology 23 (3): 469-471. 2007.
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1The Promise of Passional ReasonJournal of Philosophical Theological Research 24 (3): 93-114. 2022.In some contexts, philosophical debate can be rancorous even when the volume is kept low. In other contexts, certain stripes of “evangelical apologetics” can be equally adversarial and inimical in tone. In the name of preserving a professional, if not an irenic spirit, some unspoken ground rules have been adopted for interreligious dialogue. First is the demand to avoid all appearance of circular reasoning, which is to say avoid making any rhetorical moves that depend upon metaphysical presuppos…Read more
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Theology must be projectedIn Tim Labron (ed.), On Paul Holmer: a philosophy and theology, Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2023.
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Theology must be projectedIn Tim Labron (ed.), On Paul Holmer: a philosophy and theology, Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2023.
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Changing the Subject in Postmodernity: Narrative Ethics and Philosophical Therapy in the Works of Stanley Hauerwas and Ludwig WittgensteinDissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, School of Theology. 1998.An examination of the Wittgensteinian corpus establishes a series of stopping points in Wittgenstein's intellectual travels that together determines the trajectory of his conceptual journey. In particular, Wittgenstein's quest entailed steadily transformed notions of subject, form, and theory. I maintain that had Wittgenstein lived longer his thinking would have continued to develop in similar directions. However, each aspect of his conceptual evolution was also beset by a problem--ethical indiv…Read more
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26Wittgenstein: “I can’t believe…or rather can’t believe it yet”International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 84 (2): 161-183. 2018.Wittgenstein’s attitude toward Christian believing is more complicated that many philosophers have been led to believe. The hiccup in the received account began as a neglect of Wittgenstein’s subject-involving method in philosophy of religion. Wittgenstein’s method cannot be subsumed under the rubric of philosophy-as-[quasi-scientific]-explanation. Rather, Wittgenstein’s method was subject-involving in the sense that by his own methodology he put himself at existential risk. In 1931 he wrote tha…Read more
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45Teaching engineering ethics by conceptual design: The somatic Marker hypothesisScience and Engineering Ethics 15 (4): 563-576. 2009.In 1998, a lead researcher at a Midwestern university submitted as his own a document that had 64 instances of strings of 10 or more words that were identical to a consultant’s masters thesis and replicated a data chart, all of whose 16 entries were identical to three and four significant figures. He was fired because his actions were wrong. Curiously, he was completely unable to see that his actions were wrong. This phenomenon is discussed in light of recent advances in neuroscience and used to…Read more
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8Virtues & practices in the Christian tradition: Christian ethics after MacIntyre (edited book)University of Notre Dame Press. 1997.Using Alastair MacIntyre's work as a methodological guide for doing ethics in the Christian tradition, the contributors to this work offer essays on three subjects: description of MacIntyre's approach; reflections on moral issues; and selected essays on family, abortion, feminism and more.
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32Praying for understanding: Reading Anselm through wittgenstein1Modern Theology 20 (4): 527-546. 2004.
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1The master argument of MacIntyre's After VirtueIn Nancey C. Murphy, Brad J. Kallenberg & Mark Nation (eds.), Virtues & practices in the Christian tradition: Christian ethics after MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 7--29. 1997.
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55The Strange New World in the Church:. A Review Essay of With the Grain of the Universe by Stanley Hauerwas (review)Journal of Religious Ethics 32 (1). 2004.Hauerwas's refusal to translate the argument displayed in "With the Grain of the Universe" (his recent Gifford Lectures) into language that "anyone" can understand is itself part of the argument. Consequently, readers will not understand what Hauerwas is up to until they have attained fluency in the peculiar language that has epitomized three decades of Hauerwas's scholarship. Such fluency is not easily gained. Nevertheless, in this review essay, I situate Hauerwas's baffling language against th…Read more
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Dynamical similarity and the problem of evilIn Philip J. Rossi (ed.), God, Grace, and Creation, Orbis Books. 2010.
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59Rethinking fideism through the lens of Wittgenstein’s engineering outlookInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71 (1): 55-73. 2012.Careful readers of Wittgenstein tend to overlook the significance his engineering education had for his philosophy; this despite Georg von Wright’s stern admonition that “the two most important facts to remember about Wittgenstein were, firstly, that he was Viennese, and, secondly, that he was an engineer.” Such oversight is particularly tempting for those of us who come to philosophy late, having first been schooled in math and science, because our education tricks us into thinking we understan…Read more
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University of DaytonRegular Faculty
Dayton, Ohio, United States of America