Linda Zagzebski

This chapter argues that there are two types of epistemic reasons, one irreducibly first personal, and the other third personal. Third personal reasons are facts about the world or our minds. First personal reasons are states of consciousness such as experiences, feelings, or beliefs, not the fact that these states exist. The chapter argues that third person reasons give rise to an epistemic regress. However, a special kind of first personal reason, basic self-trust, ends the regress of third person reasons. Epistemic self-trust is the most basic reason there is. It is more basic than third person reasons and it is more basic than any other first person reasons. The regress problem arises from three assumptions: (a) A belief needs a reason, something on the basis of which I can settle for myself that the belief is true: (b) a reason needs a reason: and (c) the total set of reasons for a given belief form a single structure. The chapter rejects (c), and argues that the nature of self-trust makes it an exception to (b).

This chapter proposes that understanding is the grasp of structure. The structure of an object gives it unity and lets us see it as a single object. When we grasp an object’s structure, we understand the object. Understanding must simplify what it grasps, and the larger and more complex the object of understanding, the more we must simplify and leave out of the phenomenon components that may be important at different times or for different purposes. The object of understanding can be anything that has structure: a living organism, an event, a narrative, a piece of music, a philosophical argument, a causal relation, a human intentional act, etc.

This chapter distinguishes between _theoretical or third-personal reasons_ for believing religious propositions (facts that are logically or probabilistically connected to the truth of those propositions, typically communicable) and _deliberative or first-personal epistemic reasons_ (having an essential connection to the person who holds them, including her experiences and—crucially—her self-trust). Attacks on the intellectual virtue of a faith commitment admit of different kinds of defenses depending on the category of reasons impugned and have different consequences if successful. Attempts to undermine a believer’s confidence, for example by showing how evolutionary biology or psychology might explain away belief, should be seen for what they are: attacks on one’s first-personal reasons that should purport to have a _pervasive_ impact on one’s beliefs, yet do not bear on third-personal arguments.

Chapter 11 begins by outlining the nature of admiration, kinds of admiration, and some psychological studies of admiration. It then describes a way admiration can be made foundational in a moral theory. The proposeed theory derives the good in the sense of the desirable from the good in the sense of the admirable. It also derives the deontic concepts of right act, wrong act, and duty from the admirable. In particular, the theory is a map of the moral domain in which the foundation is exemplars of moral goodness to which we refer directly through the emotion of admiration. The theory is called _exemplarism_. Basic moral concepts are defined via direct reference to exemplars of moral goodness, picked out through the reflective use of the emotion of admiration.

This paper begins with a standard argument for theological fatalism and unravels deeper dilemmas in stages, arriving at an argument that has nothing to do with divine foreknowledge or free will. I then focus on the problem of the incoherence or at least confusion in the idea of the necessity of the past. In the final section I replace the necessity of the past with the causal closure of the past, and argue that the causal closure principle has the same problem of incoherence as the modal principle.

Knowledge is a highly valued state in which a person is in cognitive contact with reality. It is, therefore, a relation. On one side of the relation is a conscious subject, and on the other side is a portion of reality to which the knower is directly or indirectly related. While directness is a matter of degree, it is convenient to think of knowledge of things as a direct form of knowledge in comparison to which knowledge about things is indirect. The former has often been called knowledge by acquaintance since the subject is in experiential contact with the portion of reality known, whereas the latter is propositional knowledge since what the subject knows is a true proposition about the world. Knowing Roger is an example of knowledge by acquaintance, while knowing that Roger is a philosopher is an example of propositional knowledge. Knowledge by acquaintance includes not only knowledge of persons and things, but also knowledge of my own mental states. In fact, the knower's own mental states are often thought to be the most directly knowable portion of reality.

This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a “thick affective concept” A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick affective concept distinctive of the emotion. I argue that the most basic kind of moral judgment is in this category. It has the form “That is A” (pitiful, contemptible, rude, etc.). Such judgments combine the features of cognitivism and motivational judgment internalism, an advantage that explains why we find moral weakness problematic in spite of its ubiquity. I then outline a process I call “thinning” the judgment, which explains how moral strength, weakness, and apathy arise. I argue that this process is necessary for moral reasoning and communication, in spite of its disadvantage in disengaging the agent's motivating emotion from the judgment.

In this essay I outline a radical kind of virtue theory I call exemplarism, which is foundational in structure but which is grounded in exemplars of moral goodness, direct reference to which anchors all the moral concepts in the theory. I compare several different kinds of moral theory by the way they relate the concepts of the good, a right act, and a virtue. In the theory I propose, these concepts, along with the concepts of a duty and of a good life, are defined by reference to exemplars, identified directly through the emotion of admiration, not through a description. It is an advantage of the theory that what makes a good person good is not given a priori but is determined by empirical investigation. The same point applies to what good persons do and what states of affairs they aim at. The theory gives an important place to empirical investigation and narratives about exemplars analogous to the scientific investigation of natural kinds in the theory of direct reference.

Autorka argumentuje, że istnienie subiektywności wymaga przypisania Bogu dodatkowego atrybutu, który nazywa wszechsubiektywnością. Jest to własność świadomego ujmowania z doskonałą trafnością i w sposób całkowity każdego świadomego stanu każdego świadomego stworzenia z pierwszoosobowej perspektywy tego stworzenia – z perspektywy ja. W obronie możliwości wszechsubiektywności odwołuje się do analogii z empatią. Jak argumentuje, że biorąc pod uwagę istnienie świadomych istot we wszechświecie, wszechsubiektywność wynika z takich tradycyjnych atrybutów, jak wszechwiedza i wszechobecność, i jest implikowana przez tradycyjne praktyki modlitewne. Na koniec, wykorzystując ideę ujmowania przez jedną osobę subiektywności drugiej, Autorka podaje pewne wyjaśnienie różnic między świadomościami Osób Trójcy Świętej.

This original analysis examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will--those arising from Boethius, from Ockham, and from Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and Zagzebski concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal relation; the logic of counterfactual conditionals; and the differences between divine and human knowing states. An appendix introduces a new foreknowledge dilemma that purports to show that omniscient foreknowledge conflicts with deep intuitions about temporal asymmetry, quite apart from considerations of free will. Zagzebski shows that only a narrow range of solutions can handle this new dilemma. A compelling contribution to the field, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge will appeal to students and scholars of theistic philosophy and the philosophy of religion.

In 'Fatalism and the Logic of Time', Linda Zagzebski examines two interpretations of the necessity of the past. One interpretation is the modal necessity of the past, and the other interpretation is the cause of closure of the past. She argues that the combination of the necessity of the past with the transfer of necessity principle is inconsistent with the truth of any proposition about the past that entails a proposition about the future. As such, the problem is much broader than fatalism. It is a problem in the logic of time. All arrows of time, as well as the arrows of physics, arise from the human experience of before and after - but that experience does not itself require an arrow.

This book collects eighteen papers in philosophy of religion by Linda Zagzebski, spanning thirty-five years of her work. The papers are divided into eight topical categories: (1) foreknowledge and fatalism, (2) the problem of evil, (3) death, hell, and resurrection, (4) God and morality, (5) omnisubjectivity, (6) the rationality of religious belief, (7) rational religious belief, self-trust, and authority, and (8) God, Trinity, and the metaphysics of modality. All papers have been at least lightly revised. The introduction relates the papers to the main themes of Zagzebski's books in philosophy of religion and epistemology.