Joshua C. Thurow

For much of the past two millennia philosophers have embraced a priori knowledge and have thought that the a priori plays an important role in philosophy itself. Philosophers from Plato to Descartes, Kant to Kripke, all endorse the a priori and engage in a priori reasoning in their philosophical discussions. Recent work in epistemology and experimental philosophy, however, has raised questions about both the existence of a priori knowledge and the centrality of the a priori for philosophy. This collection of essays aims to advance the discussion of the a priori and its role in philosophy. The contributors include a mix of young and established philosophers, including some of the most prominent voices in philosophy today.

In his book, Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment, John Pittard presents and critiques what he calls the “master argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism.” This argument purports to show, using only higher-order reasoning and facts about religious disagreement, that nobody’s religious outlook is justified (at least, nobody aware of the argument). The master argument presupposes that any attempt to vindicate one’s religious outlook must employ dispute-independent reasons. Pittard objects to this assumption and argues, instead, for rationalist weak conciliationism: the view that partisan justification can be had when (and only when) one has rational insight into the claim in question. In this paper, I raise a challenge for rationalist weak conciliationism; in short, it is difficult to explain why only rational insight provides partisan justification while maintaining that a wide range of beliefs, including religious beliefs, can be justified in a partisan way.

According to Paul Draper and Ryan Nichols the practice of philosophy of religion—and especially its theistically committed practitioners—regularly violate norms of rationality, objectivity, and impartiality in the review, assessment, and weighing of evidence. (Draper and Nichols, 2013). We consider the charge of epistemic partisanship and show that the observational data does not illustrate a norm-violating form of inquiry. The major oversight in the charge of epistemic partiality is the epistemically central role of prior probabilities in determining the significance of incongruent evidence. We argue that reasonably divergent views on the likelihood of theism on incongruent evidence can also account for differences in significance. We conclude that it is an epistemic requirement that committed theists regard incongruent evils as much less significant evidence against theism than do lukewarm theists, agnostics, or atheists. Differences in the significance of evidence quite properly reflect differences in commitments to theism.

How does Jesus’s death atone for human sin? Traditional answers to this question face a challenge: explain how Jesus’s death plays an important and distinctive role in atoning for human sin without employing problematic philosophical or moral assumptions. I present a new answer that meets the challenge. In the context of the Jewish sacrificial background, the blood of a pure victim can communicate the washing away of sins. Jesus’s death atones because through it his blood, and then his resurrection, can communicate the washing away of sins and thus that God has accepted his work of atonement.

In Atonement, Eleonore Stump develops a novel and compelling Thomistic account of the atonement and argues that Anselmian interpretations must be rejected. In this review essay, after summarizing her account, we raise worries about some aspects of it. First, we respond to her primary objection to Anselmian interpretations by arguing that, contrary to Stump, love does not require unilateral and unconditional forgiveness. Second, we suggest that the heart of Anselmian interpretations—that reconciliation with God requires reparation/restitution/satisfaction—is plausible and well-supported by some of her own arguments. Third, we raise doubts about her views of the role of surrender in justification and the nature of justification itself. Finally, we question whether Stump’s account can successfully explain how the atonement deals with pre-justification sin. A central theme of our comments is that Stump’s Thomistic interpretation can be entwined with Anselmian interpretations to make a stronger account of the atonement.

According to the most recent articulation of her view, Marilyn Adams’s reply to the problem of horrendous evils states that God offers compensation to those who experience horrendous evils. This compensation includes the good of the incarnation of God and the good of identification with God in virtue of suffering horrendous evils. Andrew Gleeson has raised a series of objections to Adams’s recent articulation. I argue that all of Gleeson’s arguments fail or fail to pose a distinct challenge. I then present a different challenge: that her view provides insufficient compensation for horrendous evils. I conclude by suggesting a development of her view.

One of the contentious philosophical issues surrounding the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is whether well-confirmed CSR theories would debunk religious beliefs. These debates have been contentious in part because of criticisms of epistemic principles used in debunking arguments. In this paper I use Ernest Sosa’s respected theory of knowledge as fully apt belief—which avoids objections that have been leveled against sensitivity and safety principles often used in debunking arguments—to construct a plausible debunking argument for religious belief on the assumption that religious belief is formed simply through processes theorized by CSR. But, in fact, most believers also rely on arguments of various sorts, and their beliefs are not debunked.

I argue that ensouled animalism—the view that we are identical to animals that have immaterial souls as parts—has a pair of advantages over its two nearest rivals, materialistic animalism and pure dualism. Contra pure dualism, ensouled animalism can explain how physical predications can be literally true of us. Contra materialistic animalism, ensouled animalism can explain how animals can survive death. Furthermore, ensouled animalism has these advantages without creating any problems beyond those already faced by animalism and by belief in souls. However, some animalists, including Eric Olson, think that animals cannot have immaterial parts. I present a sufficient condition for animal parthood that implies animals can have immaterial parts. Ensouled animalism is not only possible, but also doubly attractive.

Anselm’s argument in Cur Deus Homo commits him to the existence of collective sin and to Jesus’s offering recompense for the human race’s collective sin. By “collective sin” I mean sin of a collective entity—in this case, the human race. In the bulk of this paper I argue that one of Anselm’s defenses of a crucial assumption of his argument—what I call Anselm’s Principle—can succeed only on the assumption that Jesus offers recompense for the collective sin of the human race. At the end of the paper’s final section I briefly present a second argument that another, quite separate, aspect of Anselm’s argument—regarding the conditions for blessed happiness—also implies that Jesus offers recompense for the collective sin of the human race.

The last 15 years or so has seen the development of a fascinating new area of cognitive science: the cognitive science of religion (CSR). Scientists in this field aim to explain religious beliefs and various other religious human activities by appeal to basic cognitive structures that all humans possess. The CSR scientific theories raise an interesting philosophical question: do they somehow show that religious belief, more specifically belief in a god of some kind, is irrational? In this paper I investigate this question and argue that CSR does not show that belief in god is irrational

Religious belief and behavior raises the following two questions: (Q1) Does God, or any other being or state that is integral to various religious traditions, exist? (Q2) Why do humans have religious beliefs and engage in religious behavior? How one answers (Q2) can affect how reasonable individuals can be in accepting a particular answer to (Q1). My aim in this chapter is to carefully distinguish the various ways in which an answer to Q2 might affect the rationality of believing in God. A literature has sprouted around this exact issue, but it has heretofore focused almost exclusively on one way in which a genealogy for p can affect the rationality of believing p – namely, by the genealogy functioning within a debunking argument. However, there are other ways a genealogy can affect the rationality of a belief. I suggest that we should be interested in whether genealogies more broadly cast doubt on religious beliefs. My main goal is: (i) to argue that CSR does not cast doubt on theistic belief in a few of the primary ways that propositions can cast doubt on other propositions, including via a debunking argument; and (ii) to suggest that one plausible way in which CSR might cast doubt on theistic belief is by undermining various traditional theistic reasons, and to illustrate how this might work with one example of a traditional theistic reason – religious experience.

One of Laurence BonJour’s main arguments for the existence of the a priori is an argument that a priori justification is indispensable for making inferences from experience to conclusions that go beyond experience. This argument has recently come under heavy fire from Albert Casullo, who has dubbed BonJour’s argument, “The Generality Argument.” In this paper I (i) defend the Generality Argument against Casullo’s criticisms, and (ii) develop a new, more plausible, version of the Generality Argument in response to some other objections of my own. Two of these objections stem out of BonJour’s failing to fully consider the importance of the distinction between being justified in believing that an inference is good and being justified in making an inference. The final version of the argument that I develop sees the Generality Argument as one part of a cumulative case argument for the existence of a priori justification, rather than as a stand-alone knock-down argument.

In his recent book Albert Casullo rejects the claim that if a belief is defeasible by non-experiential evidence then it is defeasible by experiential evidence. This claim is a crucial premise in a simple argument for the experiential defeasibility of a priori justification. I defend the premise against Casullo's objection, the main problem with which is that he does not take into account the evidential role of multiple corroborating sources of testimony. I conclude that the crucial premise is true and that the simple argument is sound; thus many of our a priori justified beliefs are experientially defeasible

Paul Benacerraf’s argument that mathematical realism is apparently incompatible with mathematical knowledge has been widely thought to also show that a priori knowledge in general is problematic. Although many philosophers have rejected Benacerraf’s argument because it assumes a causal theory of knowledge, some maintain that Benacerraf nevertheless put his finger on a genuine problem, even though he didn’t state the problem in its most challenging form. After diagnosing what went wrong with Benacerraf’s argument, I argue that a new, more challenging, version of Benacerraf’s problem can be constructed. The new version—what I call the Defeater Version—of Benacerraf’s problem makes use of a no-defeater condition on knowledge and justification. I conclude by arguing that the best way to avoid the problem is to construct a theory of how a priori judgments reliably track the facts. I also suggest four different kinds of theories worth pursuing

In this paper I develop and defend a new theory of the Atonement - the Communal Substitution Theory. According to the Communal Substitution Theory, by dying on the cross Jesus either takes on the punishment for, or offers satisfaction for, the sins of the human community. Individual humans have sinned, but human communities have sinned as well. Jesus dies for the communal sins. As a result, human communities are forgiven and reconciled to God, and through the event of communal forgiveness, individual human sins can be forgiven as well. Moving the focal point of atonement to communal sins has various advantages: well-known objections to satisfaction and penal theories are avoided, and many of the advantages of other theories of the atonement are organically integrated into the communal substitution theory.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has developed and progressively refined an argument against moral intuitionism—the view on which some moral beliefs enjoy non-inferential justification. He has stated his argument in a few different forms, but the basic idea is straightforward. To start with, Sinnott-Armstrong highlights facts relevant to the truth of moral beliefs: such beliefs are sometimes biased, influenced by various irrelevant factors, and often subject to disagreement. Given these facts, Sinnott-Armstrong infers that many moral beliefs are false. What then shall we think of our own moral beliefs? Either we have reason to think some of our moral beliefs are reliably formed or we have no such reason. If the latter, our moral beliefs are unjustified. If we have reason to think some moral beliefs are reliably formed, then those beliefs are not non-inferentially justified, because then we’ll have reason to accept something—namely, that they are reliably formed—that entails or supports those beliefs. But then, either way, our moral beliefs are not non-inferentially justified, and so moral intuitionism is false. This paper takes issue with Sinnott-Armstrong’s interesting and widely discussed argument, which we here call the Empirical Defeat Argument (EDA). According to us, the EDA does not defeat moral intuitionism. In section 1, we will set out the argument, briefly reviewing the rationale Sinnott-Armstrong offers for the premises. Then, in section 2, we identify a critical but dubious epistemological assumption concerning the nature of defeat that undergirds the argument. Finally, in section 3, we will defend our challenge to the EDA by answering two objections.