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306Religious DisagreementIn Stewart Goetz & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, Wiley-blackwell. 2021.Many people with religious beliefs, pro or con, are aware that those beliefs are denied by a great number of others who are as reasonable, intelligent, fair-minded, and relatively unbiased as they are. Such a realization often leads people to wonder, “How do I know I’m right and they’re wrong? How do I know that the basis for my belief is right and theirs is misleading?” In spite of that realization, most people stick with their admittedly controversial religious belief. This entry examines the …Read more
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44Can We Know Anything? A DebateRoutledge. 2023."In this book, Michael Huemer and Bryan Frances debate whether - and how - we can gain knowledge of the world outside of our own minds. Starting with opening statements, the debate moves through two rounds of replies. Frances argues that we lack knowledge because, for example, we cannot rule out the possibility that we are brains in vats being artificially stimulated in such a way as to create an illusion of living in the real world. Huemer disagrees that we need evidence against such possibilit…Read more
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539How Much Suffering Is Enough?Religious Studies. forthcoming.Isn’t there something like an amount and density of horrific suffering whose discovery would make it irrational to think God exists? Use your imagination to think of worlds that are much, much, much worse than you think Earth is when it comes to horrific suffering. Isn’t there some conceivable scenario which, if you were in it, would make you say “Ok, ok. God doesn’t exist, at least in the way we thought God was. We were wrong about that”? Pursuing this question leads to what I call the Problem …Read more
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242The Unfortunate Consequences of Progress in PhilosophyIn Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement, Routledge. forthcoming.We tend to think that philosophical progress, to the extent that it exists, is a good thing. I agree. Even so, it has some surprising unfortunate consequences for the rationality of philosophical belief.
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370The Epistemic Consequences of ParadoxCambridge University Press. 2022.By pooling together exhaustive analyses of certain philosophical paradoxes, we can prove a series of fascinating results regarding philosophical progress, agreement on substantive philosophical claims, knockdown arguments in philosophy, the wisdom of philosophical belief, the epistemic status of metaphysics, and the power of philosophy to refute common sense. As examples, this Element examines the Sorites Paradox, the Liar Paradox, and the Problem of the Many – although many other paradoxes can …Read more
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771Metaphysics, bullshit, and the analysis of philosophical problemsSynthese 199 (3-4): 11541-11554. 2021.Although metaphysics has made an impressive comeback over the past half century, there are still a great many philosophers today who think it is bullshit, under numerous precisifications of ‘That’s just bullshit’ so that it’s a negative assessment and doesn’t apply to most philosophy. One encounters this attitude countless times in casual conversations, social media, and occasionally in print. Is it true?
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144An Agnostic Defends God: How Science and Philosophy Support AgnosticismPalgrave-Macmillan. 2021.This book contains a unique perspective: that of a scientifically and philosophically educated agnostic who thinks there is impressive—if maddeningly hidden—evidence for the existence of God. Science and philosophy may have revealed the poverty of the familiar sources of evidence, but they generate their own partial defense of theism. Bryan Frances, a philosopher with a graduate degree in physics, judges the standard evidence for God’s existence to be awful. And yet, like many others with simila…Read more
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745Is It Rational to Reject Expert Consensus?International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (3-4): 325-345. 2020.Philosophers defend, and often believe, controversial philosophical claims. Since they aren’t clueless, they are usually aware that their views are controversial—on some occasions, the views are definitely in the minority amongst the relevant specialist-experts. In addition, most philosophers are aware that they are not God’s gift to philosophy, since they admit their ability to track truth in philosophy is not extraordinary compared to that of other philosophers. In this paper I argue that in m…Read more
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1175Philosophical proofs against common senseAnalysis 81 (1): 18-26. 2021.Many philosophers are sceptical about the power of philosophy to refute commonsensical claims. They look at the famous attempts and judge them inconclusive. I prove that, even if those famous attempts are failures, there are alternative successful philosophical proofs against commonsensical claims. After presenting the proofs I briefly comment on their significance.
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725The Epistemology of Theistic Philosophers’ Reactions to the Problem of EvilAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 94 (4): 547-572. 2020.I first argue that, contrary to many atheistic philosophers, there is good reason to think the typical theistic philosopher’s retaining of her theism when faced with the Problem of Evil is comparatively epistemically upstanding even if both atheism is true and the typical theistic philosopher has no serious criticism of the atheist’s premises in the PoE argument. However, I then argue that, contrary to many theistic philosophers, even if theism is true, the typical theistic philosopher has no go…Read more
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581The Epistemology of DisagreementIn Gerry Dunne (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. forthcoming.Short introduction to the epistemology of disagreement
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100Epistemically Different Epistemic PeersTopoi 40 (5): 1063-1073. 2019.For over a decade now epistemologists have been thinking about the peer disagreement problem of whether a person is reasonable in not lowering her confidence in her belief P when she comes to accept that she has an epistemic peer on P who disbelieves P. However, epistemologists have overlooked a key realistic way how epistemic peers can, or even have to, differ epistemically—a way that reveals the inadequacy of both conformist and non-conformist views on peer disagreement by uncovering how the c…Read more
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68The Epistemology of Real-World Religious Disagreement Without PeersPhilosophia Christi 20 (1): 289-297. 2018.When you learn that a large body of highly intelligent, fair-minded, reasonable, and relatively unbiased thinkers disagree with you, does that give you good reason to think you’re wrong? Should you think, “Wait a minute. Maybe I’ve missed something here”? Should you at least drastically reduce your confidence? There is a general epistemological problem here regarding controversial beliefs, one that has nothing especially to do with religious belief. I argue that applying this discussion to relig…Read more
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257A book on the problem of evil, focusing on alleged gratuitous suffering.
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268DisagreementStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.This article examines the central epistemological issues tied to the recognition of disagreement.
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226Philosophical ExpertiseIn David Coady & James Chase (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Applied Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 297-306. 2018.Philosophical expertise consists in knowledge, but it is controversial what this knowledge consists in. I focus on three issues: the extent and nature of knowledge of philosophical truths, how this philosophical knowledge is related to philosophical progress, and skeptical challenges to philosophical knowledge.
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138The Philosopher's Doom: Unreliable at Truth or Unreliable at LogicIn Ted Poston & Kevin McCain (eds.), The Mystery of Skepticism, Brill. 2019.By considering the epistemology and relations among certain philosophical problems, I argue for a disjunctive thesis: either (1) it is highly probable that there are (i) several (ii) mutually independent philosophical reductios of highly commonsensical propositions that are successful—so several aspects of philosophy have succeeded at refuting common sense—or (2) there is enough hidden semantic structure in even simple sentences of natural language to make philosophers highly unreliable at spott…Read more
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233Why Afterimages are Metaphysically MysteriousThink 17 (49): 33-44. 2018.A short essay for a popular audience on why afterimages are difficult to fit into any ontology.
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227This is one of those "fun" examples of a semantic paradox, written for undergraduates.
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821Presentism: Foreigner-Friendly or Xenophobic?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (3): 479-488. 2016.I argue that, for all we know, there are perfectly ordinary actual entities that are temporal in the usual sense and yet never present, past, or future. This epistemic fact requires us to modify the theses of presentism and eternalism. More importantly, it generates three new and quite serious objections to presentism, which I formulate and partially evaluate in this paper.
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611KripkeIn Barry Lee (ed.), Key Thinkers in the Philosophy of Language, Continuum. pp. 249-267. 2011.This chapter introduces Kripke's work to advanced undergraduates, mainly focussing on his "A Puzzle About Belief" and "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language".
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Propositional Attitudes and PhysicalismDissertation, University of Minnesota. 1999.Many theorists have contended that since the mind depends on the brain, the contents of our thoughts are determined by just the intrinsic physical properties of our bodies. In the first part of my dissertation I examine this theory's negation, anti-individualism, by investigating the "Twin-Earth" thought experiments of Putnam and Burge. Although anti-individualism has recently become widely accepted, I argue that none of the arguments given thus far are sound; nor has the theory been given a pro…Read more
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562Externalism, Physicalism, Statues, and HunksPhilosophical Studies 133 (2): 199-232. 2007.Content externalism is the dominant view in the philosophy of mind. Content essentialism, the thesis that thought tokens have their contents essentially, is also popular. And many externalists are supporters of such essentialism. However, endorsing the conjunction of those views either (i) commits one to a counterintuitive view of the underlying physical nature of thought tokens or (ii) commits one to a slightly different but still counterintuitive view of the relation of thought tokens to physi…Read more
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614Contradictory Belief and Epistemic Closure PrinciplesMind and Language 14 (2). 1999.Kripke’s puzzle has puts pressure on the intuitive idea that one can believe that Superman can fly without believing that Clark Kent can fly. If this idea is wrong then many theories of belief and belief ascription are built from faulty data. I argue that part of the proper analysis of Kripke’s puzzle refutes the closure principles that show up in many important arguments in epistemology, e.g., if S is rational and knows that P and that P entails Q, then if she considers these two beliefs and Q,…Read more
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1234When a Skeptical Hypothesis Is LiveNoûs 39 (4). 2005.I’m going to argue for a set of restricted skeptical results: roughly put, we don’t know that fire engines are red, we don’t know that we sometimes have pains in our lower backs, we don’t know that John Rawls was kind, and we don’t even know that we believe any of those truths. However, people unfamiliar with philosophy and cognitive science do know all those things. The skeptical argument is traditional in form: here’s a skeptical hypothesis; you can’t epistemically neutralize it, you have to b…Read more
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828The Atheistic Argument from OutrageousnessThink 17 (48): 107-116. 2018.When pressed, many atheists offer three reasons why they reject theism: there is strong evidence against theism, there is no strong evidence for theism, and theism is so outrageous that it needs a great deal of support in order for us to believe it in a reasonable manner. I examine the third reason, arguing that it fails.
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2140The Irrationality of Religious BeliefThink 15 (42): 15-33. 2016.Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational and unscientific. If you ask a philosopher, however, you'll likely get two answers: most religious belief is rational in some respects and irrational in other respects. In my previous essay I explained why they think so many religious beliefs are rational. In this essay I explain why they think those same beliefs are irrational
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1404Religious DisagreementIn Graham Robert Oppy (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, Routledge. 2015.In this essay I try to motivate and formulate the main epistemological questions to ask about the phenomenon of religious disagreement. I will not spend much time going over proposed answers to those questions. I address the relevance of the recent literature on the epistemology of disagreement. I start with some fiction and then, hopefully, proceed with something that has at least a passing acquaintance with truth.
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541Ontology, Composition, Quantification and ActionAnalysis 76 (2): 137-142. 2016.The literature on material composition has largely ignored the composition of actions and events. I argue that this is a mistake. I present a set of individually plausible yet jointly inconsistent claims regarding the connection between quantification and existence, the composition of physical entities and the logical forms of action sentences.
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