•  254
    Religious Disagreement
    In 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
  •  19
    "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
  •  441
    How 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
  •  176
    The Unfortunate Consequences of Progress in Philosophy
    In Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Richard Rowland (eds.), Routledge Handbook 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.
  •  321
    The Epistemic Consequences of Paradox
    Cambridge 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
  •  702
    Metaphysics, bullshit, and the analysis of philosophical problems
    Synthese 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?
  •  140
    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
  •  671
    Is 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
  •  1084
    Philosophical proofs against common sense
    Analysis 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.
  •  657
    The Epistemology of Theistic Philosophers’ Reactions to the Problem of Evil
    American 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
  •  526
    Short introduction to the epistemology of disagreement
  •  83
    Epistemically Different Epistemic Peers
    Topoi 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
  •  58
    The Epistemology of Real-World Religious Disagreement Without Peers
    Philosophia 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
  •  249
    A book on the problem of evil, focusing on alleged gratuitous suffering.
  •  239
    Disagreement
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.
    This article examines the central epistemological issues tied to the recognition of disagreement.
  •  195
    Philosophical Expertise
    In 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.
  •  118
    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
  •  923
    Justifying a Large Part of Philosophy
    Think 18 (51): 93-99. 2019.
    I explain why research in non-applied, non-interdisciplinary, non-historical philosophy is worthwhile. The key move in the explanation is the realization that many philosophical problems can be put in the form of a set of highly plausible yet apparently jointly inconsistent claims regarding a fundamental notion.Export citation.
  •  501
    Spirituality, Expertise, and Philosophers
    In L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 44-81. 2013.
    We all can identify many contemporary philosophy professors we know to be theists of some type or other. We also know that often enough their nontheistic beliefs are as epistemically upstanding as the non-theistic beliefs of philosophy professors who aren’t theists. In fact, the epistemic-andnon-theistic lives of philosophers who are theists are just as epistemically upstanding as the epistemic-and-non-theistic lives of philosophers who aren’t theists. Given these and other, similar, facts, ther…Read more
  •  210
    Preface & Chp 1 of 'Scepticism Comes Alive'
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
    The preface and chapter 1 of my book Scepticism Comes Alive, 2005 OUP.
  •  1060
    Extensive Philosophical Agreement and Progress
    Metaphilosophy 48 (1-2): 47-57. 2017.
    This article argues, first, that there is plenty of agreement among philosophers on philosophically substantive claims, which fall into three categories: reasons for or against certain views, elementary truths regarding fundamental notions, and highly conditionalized claims. This agreement suggests that there is important philosophical progress. It then argues that although it's easy to list several potential kinds of philosophical progress, it is much harder to determine whether the potential i…Read more
  •  59
    Varieties of Things: Foundations of Contemporary Metaphysics—Cynthia Macdonald (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 47 (3): 380-382. 2007.
    Book review
  •  629
    A Test for Theories of Belief Ascription
    Analysis 62 (2): 116-125. 2002.
    These days the two most popular approaches to belief ascription are Millianism and Contextualism. The former approach is inconsistent with the existence of ordinary Frege cases, such as Lois believing that Superman flies while failing to believe that Clark Kent flies. The Millian holds that the only truth-conditionally relevant aspect of a proper name is its referent or extension. Contextualism, as I will define it for the purposes of this essay, includes all theories according to which ascripti…Read more
  •  228
    Scepticism and Disagreement
    In Diego Machuca & Baron Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 581-591. 2018.
    There is a long history of using facts about disagreement to argue that many of our most precious beliefs are false in a way that can make a difference in our lives. In this essay I go over a series of such arguments, arguing that the best arguments target beliefs that meet two conditions: (i) they have been investigated and debated for a very long time by a great many very smart people who are your epistemic superiors on the matter and have worked very hard under optimal circumstances to figure…Read more
  •  1539
    Philosophical Renegades
    In Jennifer Lackey & David Christensen (eds.), The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 121-166. 2013.
    If you retain your belief upon learning that a large number and percentage of your recognized epistemic superiors disagree with you, then what happens to the epistemic status of your belief? I investigate that theoretical question as well has the applied case of philosophical disagreement—especially disagreement regarding purely philosophical error theories, theories that do not have much empirical support and that reject large swaths of our most commonsensical beliefs. I argue that even if al…Read more
  •  558
    Live Skeptical Hypotheses
    In John Greco (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Skepticism, Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245. 2008.
    Those of us who take skepticism seriously typically have two relevant beliefs: (a) it’s plausible (even if false) that in order to know that I have hands I have to be able to epistemically neutralize, to some significant degree, some skeptical hypotheses, such as the brain-in-a-vat (BIV) one; and (b) it’s also plausible (even if false) that I can’t so neutralize those hypotheses. There is no reason for us to also think (c) that the BIV hypothesis, for instance, is plausible or probably true. In …Read more
  •  1066
    Discovering Disagreeing Epistemic Peers and Superiors
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1): 1-21. 2012.
    Suppose you know that someone is your epistemic peer regarding some topic. You admit that you cannot think of any relevant epistemic advantage you have over her when it comes to that topic; you admit that she is just as likely as you to get P's truth-value right. Alternatively, you might know that she is your epistemic superior regarding the topic. And then after learning this about her you find out that she disagrees with you about P. In those situations it appears that the confidence with whic…Read more
  •  199
    This is one of those "fun" examples of a semantic paradox, written for undergraduates.