•  56
    Hume's Pragmaticist Argument for the Reality of God
    with Hermann Deuser
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 9 (1). 1995.
    The author examines Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to discover a variant of the usual teleological argument that abandons reliance on analogical reasoning. This second version, never refuted in the Dialogues, is termed "pragmaticist" in Peirce's sense. It relies on an abductive hypothesis that claims not logical proof but the power of instinctual conviction. The Dialogues' espousal of sound common sense may then be viewed as an imperfectly articulated precursor of Peirce's pragm…Read more
  •  30
    Christianity—Sign Among Signs?
    with Hermann Deuser
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 7 (4). 1993.
    The author uses Eco's The Name of the Rose to pose the problem of the relation between the infinite aesthetic play of semiotics and pragmatic moral responsibility for human conduct. This problem is addressed through Peirce's semiotic theory, which not only links signs to objects, but situates them in an interpretant relation that is formative of human conduct. Religion is advanced as the paradigm of this relation; a "categorial semiotic" where concrete symbolic acts move beyond nominalism thro…Read more
  •  83
    History and the other: Dussel’s challenge to Levinas
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (3): 315-330. 2004.
    a product of human thought that betrays the lived uniqueness of persons, reducing ‘otherness’ to the categories of the understanding and to its historical consequences? Or is history too ‘thick’ to be synchronized in memory and historical consciousness? The article, taking its inspiration from Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation and particular moments of Latin American history, develops the notion of the proximity of history, phenomenologically critiquing Emmanuel Levinas’s own reduction of hi…Read more
  •  22
    The Infinite Passion of Responsibility: A Critique of Absolute Knowing
    Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University. 1998.
    What is the relationship between knowledge and ethics? Does what we know and the reason that secures knowledge determine ethical responsibility, or might ethical responsibility itself awaken and animate the enterprise of knowing? The dissertation affirms the priority of ethics by juxtaposing two accounts of the relationship between truth and goodness. It critiques Hegel's systematic conception of absolute knowing by showing that this knowing elides the anarchical ethical demand arising from the …Read more