•  3
    Blues - Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking Deep About Feeling Low
    with Abrol Fairweather and Bruce Iglauer
    Wiley. 2012.
    The philosophy of the blues From B.B. King to Billie Holiday, Blues music not only sounds good, but has an almost universal appeal in its reflection of the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Its ability to powerfully touch on a range of social and emotional issues is philosophically inspiring, and here, a diverse range of thinkers and musicians offer illuminating essays that make important connections between the human condition and the Blues that will appeal to music lovers and philosoph…Read more
  •  5
    Belief, Inner Assent, and Cognitive Phenomenology
    Review of Metaphysics 76 (4): 703-724. 2023.
    Abstract:The propositional attitude account of belief holds that belief involves a favorable mental attitude borne by an agent toward a proposition. On what the authors term the "Inner Assent" account of belief, such a mental attitude has been characterized in such terms as inner assent, inner affirmation, inner acceptance, or inner agreement. As such, the Inner Assent account can be seen as an effort to characterize the phenomenology of belief in terms of a phenomenology of inner assent or kind…Read more
  • Blues–Philosophy for Everyone (edited book)
    with Fritz Allhoff and Abrol Fairweather
    Wiley‐Blackwell. 2011-12-09.
  •  3
    Navigating What Is Valuable and Steering a Course in Pursuit of Happiness
    with Michael Stuckart
    In Patrick Goold & Fritz Allhoff (eds.), Sailing – Philosophy for Everyone, Blackwell. 2012.
    This chapter contains sections titled: What's So Great About Sailing? Aristotle, Virtues, and Flourishing Is Sailing Virtuous? Is Sailing More Virtuous Than Other Pursuits? Conclusion.
  •  1
    Doubt and the Human Condition
    In Fritz Allhoff, Jesse R. Steinberg & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Blues–Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011.
    This chapter contains sections titled: How Does One Avoid Skepticism? The Experience Machine Contextualism My Take on Skepticism Notes.
  •  154
    Ethics of Human Enhancement: An Executive Summary (review)
    Science and Engineering Ethics 17 (2): 201-212. 2011.
    With multi-year funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a team of researchers has just released a comprehensive report detailing ethical issues arising from human enhancement (Allhoff et al. 2009). While we direct the interested reader to that (much longer) report, we also thank the editors of this journal for the invitation to provide an executive summary thereof. This summary highlights key results from each section of that report and does so in a self-standing way; in other w…Read more
  •  210
    Why an unsurpassable being cannot create a surpassable world
    Religious Studies 41 (3): 323-333. 2005.
    Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder suggest that it is possible for an omnipotent being, Jove, to create randomly a world from a continuum of ever more perfect possible worlds. They then go on to argue that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable despite creating a surpassable world. I raise a number of problems for the view that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable when he creates (randomly or not) a surpassable world
  •  61
    God and the possibility of random creation
    Sophia 47 (2): 193-199. 2008.
    In this paper I discuss a number of problems associated with the suggestion that it is possible for God to randomly select a possible world for actualization.
  •  6433
    Response to Fritz Allhoff, "Telomeres and the Ethics of Human Cloning"
    American Journal of Bioethics 5 (1). 2005.
    Fritz Allhoff has recently offered an extremely compelling challenge to the morality of human cloning. He argues that a biological phenomenon, that of telomere shortening, undermines the moral permissibility of human cloning. Telomere shortening is caused by cell replication, and appears to be one of the central reasons that cells and organisms age and die. Allhoff considers a thirty-year-old woman who wishes to create a genetic clone. He notes that the DNA from her cell that would be used to cr…Read more
  •  120
    Numerous examples have been offered that purportedly show that God cannot be omnipotent. I argue that a common response to such examples (i.e., that failure to do the impossible does not indicate a lack of power) does not preserve God’s omnipotence in the face of some of these examples. I consider another possible strategy for preserving God’s omnipotence in the face of these examples and find it wanting.
  •  154
    Leibniz, creation and the best of all possible worlds
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 62 (3). 2007.
    Leibniz argued that God would not create a world unless it was the best possible world. I defend Leibniz’s argument. I then consider whether God could refrain from creating if there were no best possible world. I argue that God, on pain of contradiction, could not refrain from creating in such a situation. I conclude that either this is the best possible world or God is not our creator.
  •  145
    _The philosophy of the blues_ From B.B. King to Billie Holiday, Blues music not only sounds good, but has an almost universal appeal in its reflection of the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Its ability to powerfully touch on a range of social and emotional issues is philosophically inspiring, and here, a diverse range of thinkers and musicians offer illuminating essays that make important connections between the human condition and the Blues that will appeal to music lovers and philoso…Read more
  •  3432
    Dispositions and subjunctives
    Philosophical Studies 148 (3). 2010.
    It is generally agreed that dispositions cannot be analyzed in terms of simple subjunctive conditionals (because of what are called “masked dispositions” and “finkish dispositions”). I here defend a qualified subjunctive account of dispositions according to which an object is disposed to Φ when conditions C obtain if and only if, if conditions C were to obtain, then the object would Φ ceteris paribus . I argue that this account does not fall prey to the objections that have been raised in the li…Read more
  •  53
    Given that an analysis of disposition ascription cannot be made in terms of a simple subjunctive conditional, we present a multiply qualified conditional analysis that places disposition ascription within an implicit fundamental causal conceptual typography within which a disposition ascription is embedded, framed, and understood. By placing the multiply qualified analysis within an implicit causal matrix involving a focal cause, pathway of influence, mechanism of action, contributing/partial ca…Read more
  •  80
    Why an unsurpassable being cannot create a surpassable world
    Religious Studies 41 (3): 323-333. 2005.
    Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder suggest that it is possible for an omnipotent being, Jove, to create randomly a world from a continuum of ever more perfect possible worlds. They then go on to argue that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable despite creating a surpassable world. I raise a number of problems for the view that Jove could be characterized as morally unsurpassable when he creates (randomly or not) a surpassable world.
  •  20
    Doubt and the Human Condition
    In Jesse R. Steinberg & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Blues -- Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking Deep About Feeling Low, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 111--120. 2012.
  •  10
    Reply to Allhoff on telomeres and the ethics of cloning
    American Journal of Bioethics 5 (1): 27-28. 2005.
  •  62
    Ceteris paribus causal generalizations and scientific inquiry in empirical psychology
    with Christopher M. Layne and Alan M. Steinberg
    Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 32 (3): 180-190. 2012.
    In defending the scientific legitimacy of ceteris paribus qualified causal generalizations, we situate and specify the reference of the ceteris paribus proviso within a fundamental causal framework consisting of causal agents, pathways of influence, mediators, moderators, and causal consequences. In so doing, we provide an explication of the reference and utility of the ceteris paribus proviso in terms of mediators and moderators as these constitute the range of factors that can impinge on the r…Read more
  •  955
    I argue that there is a continuum of judgments ranging from those that are affectively rich, what might be called passionate judgments, to those that are purely cognitive and nonaffective, what might be called dispassionate judgments. The former are akin to desires and other affective states and so are necessarily motivating. Applying this schema to moral judgments, I maintain that the motivational internalist is wrong in claiming that all moral judgments are necessarily motivating, but right in…Read more
  •  1175
    We consider and reject a variety of attempts to provide a ground for identifying and differentiating disembodied minds. Until such a ground is provided, we must withhold inclusion of disembodied minds from our picture of the world.