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8The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals (edited book)Routledge. 2020.Contemporary research in philosophy of religion is dominated by traditional problems such as the nature of evil, arguments against theism, issues of foreknowledge and freedom, the divine attributes, and religious pluralism. This volume instead focuses on unrepresented and underrepresented issues in the discipline. The essays address how issues like race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, feminist and pantheist conceptions of the divine, and nonhuman animals connect to existing iss…Read more
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9Free Will and NaturalismIn Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.Free will is, allegedly, incompatible with naturalism. We aim to show that it is not. More specifically, we aim to show that a libertarian, agent‐causal account of free will is consistent with a naturalistic metaphysics. After some initial terminological and methodological clarifications, we examine recent arguments by naturalists for the nonexistence of free will and argue that they fail. We then develop an account of free will that ought to be acceptable to the naturalist.
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20Cognitive Disabilities, Forms of Exclusion, and the Ethics of Social InteractionsJournal of Philosophy of Disability 2 157-184. 2022.Cognitively disabled individuals have been marginalized by our larger culture; they’ve also been marginalized in philosophical discussions. This paper seeks to begin correcting this situation by examining how assumptions which shape our social interactions and expectations disadvantage individuals with a range of cognitive disabilities. After considering Rubella syndrome and autism in detail, I argue that we have a moral obligation to change how we approach social interactions with cognitively d…Read more
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9Inevitability of SinTheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 7 (2). 2022.Part of the traditional Christian doctrine of sin is the claim that, due to the effects of original sin, acts of sin are inevitable. Of course, our reflection on sinful actions is shaped by how we think about human freedom and divine providence more broadly. Some have argued that libertarians have a difficult time accounting for the inevitability of sin. This paper uses David Lewis’s work on counterfactuals and possible worlds to give an account of how the inevitability of sin can be understood.…Read more
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23Denying a Unified Concept of DisabilityJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (5): 583-596. 2022.This paper argues that there are reasons to believe that there is no single concept or category which demarcates all individuals who have a disability from those individuals who do not. The paper begins by describing that I call ‘a Unified Concept View of Disability’ and the role that such a view plays in debates about the nature of disability. After considering reasons to think that our concept of disability is not unified in the way that the Unified Concept View assumes, I outline what a non-u…Read more
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1029Disability and Social EpistemologyIn Jennifer Lackey & Aidan McGlynn (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, Oxford University Press. 2024.This chapter canvases a number of ways that issues surrounding disability intersect with social epistemology. We begin with a discussion of how social epistemology as a field and debates concerning epistemic injustice in particular would benefit from further (a) engaging the fields of disability studies and philosophy of disability and (b) more directly addressing the problem of ableism. In section two, we turn to issues of testimony, “intuitive horribleness,” and their relationship to debates c…Read more
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13The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children, edited by Anca Gheaus, Gideon Calder, and Jurgen De Wispelaere. Routledge Press, 2019. Pp. 424. $ 220 (hardback) (review)Faith and Philosophy 37 (1): 118-122. 2020.
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13Public Policy and the Administrative Evil of Special EducationIn David Boonin (ed.), Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 249-262. 2018.This chapter examines public policy as it applies to public education for students with disabilities in the United States. Public policy with respect to ‘special education’ has made important strides in the past half century and is not unjust in the explicit ways that it used to be. However, current US public special education policy is still unjust insofar as it is an instance of what Guy Adams and Danny Balfour call ‘administrative evil.’ Addressing this administrative evil will require both p…Read more
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7Rethinking Responsibility, by K. E. Boxer: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. ix + 176, £30.00Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (1): 205-206. 2014.
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129Moral Ecology, Disabilities, and Human Agency špace 1pc 2018 Wade Memorial LectureRes Philosophica 96 (1): 17-41. 2019.This paper argues that human agency is not simply a function of intrinsic properties about the agent, but that agency instead depends on the ecology that the agent is in. In particular, the paper examines ways that disabilities affect agency and shows how, by paying deliberate attention to structuring the social environment around people with disabilities, we can mitigate some of the agential impact of those disabilities. The paper then argues that the impact of one’s social environment on agenc…Read more
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38‘Upright, Whole, and Free’: Eschatological Union with GodTheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 2 (2). 2018.
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73Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil, by Guillaume BignonFaith and Philosophy 35 (3): 373-379. 2018.
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23Noell Birondo and S. Stewart Braun , Virtue's Reasons: New Essays on Virtue, Character, and Reasons. Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 38 (1): 4-7. 2018.
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216Stewart Goetz. Freedom, Teleology and Evil . Continuum, 2008European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (2): 460--465. 2011.
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71Virtues and Their Vices (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2013.A comprehensive philosophical treatment of the virtues and their competing vices. The first four sections focus on historical classes of virtue: the cardinal virtues, the capital vices and the corrective virtues, intellectual virtues, and the theological virtues. A final section discusses the role of virtue theory in a number of disciplines
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131Demotivating SemicompatibilismIdeas Y Valores 58 (141): 5-20. 2009.In this paper, I explore some of the motivations behind John Martin Fischer's semi-compatibilism. Particularly, I look at three reasons Fischer gives for preferring semi-compatibilism to libertarianism. I argue that the first two of these motivations are in tension with each other: the more one is moved by the first motivation, the less one can appeal to the second, and vice versa. I then argue that Fischer's third motivation ought not move anyone to prefer Fischer's semi-compatibilist picture t…Read more
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1Free Will: Alternatives and SourcesIn Ryan Nichols, Nicholas D. Smith & Fred Dycus Miller (eds.), Philosophy Through Science Fiction: A Coursebook with Readings, Routledge. pp. 397-408. 2008.
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1Normative EthicsIn Ron Mallon & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings, Oup Usa. pp. 495-505. 2012.
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Religious BeliefIn Ron Mallon & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Philosophy: Traditional and Experimental Readings, Oup Usa. pp. 3-12. 2012.
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3The Arbitrariness of the Primal SinIn L. Kvanvig Jonathan (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 234-257. 2013.Considerations of the primal sin show that both voluntarist and intellectual accounts involve an unresolved arbitrariness at the heart of their accounts of free agency. This suggests that, at least for theists, intellectualism is no better than voluntarism in this respect and that, on the assumption that such a sin happened, voluntarist accounts are not as problematic as many believe them to be. The paper proceeds as follows. In the first section, I explain what is meant by 'primal sin' and why …Read more
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1Introduction to Virtues and Their VicesIn Timpe Kevin & Boyd Craig (eds.), Virtues and Their Vices, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-34. 2013.
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1'This is Water' and Religious Self-DeceptionIn Robert K. Bolger & Scott Korb (eds.), Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 53-69. 2014.David Foster Wallace described the point of his “This Is Water” commencement address’s fish parable as "merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” In the following pages I take this theme as my focus. More specifically, I apply this theme to the issue of self-deception and argue that self-deception is often one of the most important issues we face, even if it’s among the hardest to see. Furthermore, while I think these lessons a…Read more
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Trust, Silence, and Liturgical ActsIn Justin McBrayer Trent Dougherty (ed.), Skeptical Theism: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 264-275. 2014.
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1Free Will and the Stages of Theological AnthropologyIn Joshua R. Farris & Charles Taliaferro (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, Ashgate Publishing Company. pp. 233-244. 2015.The basic idea of the article is to explain how free will relates to the progression from the status integritatis to the status corruptionis to the status gratiae to the status gloriae, contrasting libertarian and compatibilist views. We argue that either account can give an account of these stages (even though it might seem that compatibilist views would have it easier).
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Free Will and Naturalism: How to be a Libertarian and a Naturalist TooIn Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 319-335. 2015.As pop naturalists tell it, free will is incompatible with naturalism. And apparently many scientists agree. Philosopher Daniel Dennett reports, for example, that he has “learned from discussions with a variety of scientists…[that] free will, in their view, is obviously incompatible with naturalism, with determinism, and very likely incoherent against any background, so they cheerfully insist that of course they don’t have free will” (2013, 47). Many philosophers, however, disagree (e.g., Mele 2…Read more
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1God's Freedom, God's CharacterIn Kevin Timpe & Daniel Speak (eds.), Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 277-293. 2016.My goal in this chapter is to consider the connection between an agent’s moral character and those actions that she is capable of freely performing. Most of these connections hold for all moral agents, but my particular focus will be on the specific case of divine agency. That is, I’m primarily interested in the connection between God’s moral character and His exercise of His free agency. As I will argue, even if an agent’s character determines her choices or actions, that doesn’t threaten the a…Read more
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Free Will |
Disability |
Virtue Ethics |
Philosophy of Religion |
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Philosophy of Action |
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