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34The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs, written by Hans Van EyghenInternational Journal for the Study of Skepticism 14 (1): 79-85. 2023.
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88Causation and Universals.The secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume.Causation: A Realist ApproachPhilosophical Quarterly 41 (165): 494-498. 1991.
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114Review: Hans Radder: The World Observed/The World Conceived (review)Mind 117 (466): 505-507. 2008.
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10Sensible AnimismIn Tiddy Smith (ed.), Animism and Philosophy of Religion, Springer Verlag. pp. 179-197. 2022.Animistic religious thought is extremely widespread, and can be found even in religions practiced by “modern” societies. But it is commonly thought to bear the hallmarks of “primitive” thinking processes, which in the anthropological tradition have typically been taken to involve various cognitive errors. Here I am going to argue that this misunderstands and misrepresents the content of such thinking, which is by no means as unsophisticated as it is usually considered to be. I shall be using Rob…Read more
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12Theodicy in a Vale of TearsIn Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley. 2013.Theodicies can be distinguished as “hard-nosed” or “good-hearted.” Typical features of each are given. I reject the former; they set the bar too low for God. Considerable discussion is devoted to Eleonore Stump's recent Wandering in Darkness, which sets the standard for good-hearted theodicies. I then develop the notion of a “perfect creature”, a possible being indistinguishable from God except lacking aseity, and argue that God should have created only perfect creatures. Since He did not, He is…Read more
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130Causation and UniversalsRoutledge. 1990.The world contains objective causal relations and universals, both of which are intimately connected. If these claims are true, they must have far-reaching consequences, breathing new life into the theory of empirical knowledge and reinforcing epistemological realism. Without causes and universals, Professor Fales argues, realism is defeated, and idealism or scepticism wins. Fales begins with a detailed analysis of David Hume's argument that we have no direct experience of necessary connections …Read more
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95Are the Gods Apolitical?Philo. 1999.The attraction between religion and politics is perennial. Sometimes, in its long and checkered history, it has led to an adulterous affair. I want to ask what lies at the heart of this attraction, and whether that can shed any light on the current religious/political scene. But the romance metaphor is at bottom not a good one. I shall argue that, in their originary condition, religion and politics are "closer," both ontologically and in their motivation, than woman and man, closer than siblings…Read more
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119Divine freedom and the choice of a worldInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 35 (2). 1994.
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133A Defense of the GivenPhilosophical Review 108 (1): 128. 1999.The “doctrine of the given” that Fales defends holds that there are certain experiences such that we can have justified beliefs about their “contents” that are not based on any other beliefs, and that the rest of our justified empirical beliefs rest on those “basic beliefs.” The features of experience basic beliefs are about are said to be “given.” Fales holds that some basic beliefs are infallible, having a kind of clarity that guarantees their truth to the believer. In addition, some basic bel…Read more
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90Turtle epistemologyPhilosophical Studies 169 (2): 339-354. 2014.In “Justification Without Awareness”, Michael Bergmann divides internalist epistemologies into those with a strong awareness requirement and those with a weak awareness requirement; he presents a dilemma, hoisting the “strongs” on one horn, and the “weaks” on the other. Here I reply on behalf of the strong-awareness view, presenting what I take to be a more satisfactory, and more fundamental, reply to Bergmann than I believe has been offered by his other critics, and in particular by Rogers and …Read more
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153Divine Commands and Moral ObligationPhilo 13 (2). 2010.A popular proof for the existence of God assumes that there are objective moral duties, arguing that this can only be explained by there being a supreme law-giver, namely God. The upshot is either a Divine command theory (DCT) -- or something similar -- or a natural-law theory. I discuss two prominent theories, Robert Adams’s DCT and Stephen Evans’s hybrid DCT/natural-law theory. I argue that they suffer from fatal difficulties. Natural-law theories are plausible, if God exists, but can’t be use…Read more
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172Review of John Foster, The Divine Lawmaker: Lectures on Induction, Laws of Nature, and the Existence of God (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2004 (9). 2004.
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64Antediluvian TheodicyFaith and Philosophy 6 (3): 320-329. 1989.This paper is a discussion of Eleonore Stump’s “The Problem of Evil.” Stump, I argue, has attempted a theodicy with several desirable features; among them, an effort to provide a positive account of the compatibility of natural evils with God’s goodness that makes use of specifically Christian doctrines. However, the doctrines Stump makes use of---and, in particular, her conception of hell and her interpretation of original sin---raise, I suggest, more problems than they solve.
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4Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 13 (4): 524-529. 1983.
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137Divine InterventionFaith and Philosophy 14 (2): 170-194. 1997.Some philosophers deny that science can investigate the supernatural - specifically, the nature and actions of God. If a divine being is atemporal, then, indeed, this seems plausible - but only, I shall argue, because such a being could not causally interact with anything. Here I discuss in detail two major attempts, those of Stump and Kretzmann, and of Leftow, to make sense of theophysical causation on the supposition that God is eternal. These views are carefully worked out, and their failures…Read more
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46Scientific explanations of mystical experiences: Evan FalesReligious Studies 32 (3): 297-313. 1996.In Part I of this paper, I took up a challenge posed by Alston , Wainwright , Yandell , and other theists who hold the rather natural view that mystical experiences provide perceptual contact with God, roughly on a par with the access sense experience affords to the natural world. These theists recognize, at the same time, that the plausibility of this view would be significantly compromised by the possibility of scientifically explaining mystical experiences – especially if a scientific explana…Read more
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3Causal knowledge: What can psychology teach philosophersJournal of Mind and Behavior 13 (1): 1-28. 1992.Theories of how organisms learn about cause-effect relations have a history dating back at least to the associationist/mechanistic hypothesis of David Hume. Some contemporary theories of causal learning are descendants of Hume's mechanistic models of conditioning, but others impute principled, rule-based reasoning. Since even primitive animals are conditionable, it is clear that there are built-in mechanical algorithms that respond to cause/effect relations. The evidence suggests that humans ret…Read more
Iowa City, Iowa, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Religion |