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282Religious 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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32Can 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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498How 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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213The Unfortunate Consequences of Progress in PhilosophyIn Maria Baghramian, J. Adam Carter & Rach Cosker-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.
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354The 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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743Metaphysics, 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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143An 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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710Is 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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1139Philosophical 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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705The 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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554The Epistemology of DisagreementIn Gerry Dunne (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. forthcoming.Short introduction to the epistemology of disagreement
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89Epistemically 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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63The 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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254A book on the problem of evil, focusing on alleged gratuitous suffering.
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262DisagreementStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2018.This article examines the central epistemological issues tied to the recognition of disagreement.
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213Philosophical 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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130The 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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2981This is an essay written for students regarding how to write a philosophy paper.
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1078Worrisome Skepticism About PhilosophyEpisteme 13 (3): 289-303. 2016.A new kind of skepticism about philosophy is articulated and argued for. The key premise is the claim that many of us are well aware that in the past we failed to have good responses to substantive objections to our philosophical beliefs. The conclusion is disjunctive: either we are irrational in sticking with our philosophical beliefs, or we commit some other epistemic sin in having those beliefs.
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1063DisagreementIn Duncan Pritchard & Sven Bernecker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2010.This is a short essay that presents what I take to be the main questions regarding the epistemology of disagreement.
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394This is an essay for undergraduates. I set out the statue/clay problem and Tibbles/Tib in rich detail. I also present, with less detail, some other puzzles about material composition.
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901The Dual Concepts Objection to Content ExternalismAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2): 123-138. 2016.Many philosophers have used premises about concepts and rationality to argue that the protagonists in the various Twin Earth thought experiments do not have the concepts that content externalists say they have. This essay argues that this popular internalist argument is flawed in many different ways, and more importantly it cannot be repaired in order to cast doubt on externalism.
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879DisagreementPolity. 2014.Regardless of who you are or how you live your life, you disagree with millions of people on an enormous number of topics from politics, religion and morality to sport, culture and art. Unless you are delusional, you are aware that a great many of the people who disagree with you are just as smart and thoughtful as you are - in fact, you know that often they are smarter and more informed. But believing someone to be cleverer or more knowledgeable about a particular topic usually won’t change you…Read more
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74Scepticism Comes AliveOxford University Press UK. 2005.In epistemology the nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present, whispering that 'You can't know that you have hands, or just about anything else, because for all you know your whole life is a dream.' Philosophers have recently devised ingenious ways to argue against and silence this voice, but Bryan Frances now presents a highly original argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes defeat the traditional sc…Read more
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416On the Explanatory Deficiencies of Linguistic ContentPhilosophical Studies 93 (1): 45-75. 1999.The Burge-Putnam thought experiments have generated the thesis that beliefs are not fixed by the constitution of the body. However, many philosophers have thought that if this is true then there must be another content-like property. Even if the contents of our attitudes such as the one in ‘believes that aluminum is a light metal’, do not supervene on our physical makeups, nevertheless people who are physical duplicates must be the same when it comes to evaluating their rationality and explain…Read more
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420Defending the DefenseMind 108 (431): 563-566. 1999.My hunch has always been that in the end, Fregeanism will defeat Millianism. So I suspect that my (1998) arguments on behalf of Millianism are flawed. Peter Graham (1999) is confident he has found the flaws, but he has not. I hope that some clarification will encourage others to reveal the errors.
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2910The Rationality of Religious BeliefsThink 14 (40): 109-117. 2015.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 this essay I explain why they think religious belief is rational. In a sequel essay I explain why they think the very same beliefs are irrational
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463I say that it’s philosophically inexpensive because I think it is more convincing than any other Twin-Earth thought experiment in that it sidesteps many of the standard objections to the usual thought experiments. I also discuss narrow contents and give an analysis of Putnam’s original argument.
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225A presentation and analysis of the twin-earth thought experiments.
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