University of Colorado, Boulder
Department of Philosophy
PhD
Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
  •  804
    Doxastic Voluntarism
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2024.
    Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes a specific proposition? D…Read more
  •  77
    Why Every Belief is a Choice: Descartes’ Doxastic Voluntarism Reconsidered
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (2): 158-178. 2023.
    Descartes appears to hold that everything we believe is the product of a voluntary choice. Scholars have been reluctant to take this particularly radical version of doxastic voluntarism as Descartes’ considered position. I argue that once Descartes’ compatibilist conception of free will as well as his position on the ‘freedom of indifference’ are taken into account, the primary motivations for the rejection of the aforementioned radical version of doxastic voluntarism lose their force. Consequen…Read more
  •  26
    Only Light and Evidence: Locke on the Will to Believe
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 38 (1): 1-21. 2021.
    John Locke has been widely understood to hold that belief is under one's direct control. This doxastic voluntarism appears to be implicit in his evidentialism, his doxastic moralism, and his postulation of an ability to suspend assent. I argue, first, that interpreting Locke as a doxastic voluntarist is untenable—at odds with his conception of knowledge, probable assent, and religious belief. I also claim that interpreting Locke as a voluntarist fails to cohere with his understanding of the inte…Read more
  •  64
    Robert Holcot on Doxastic Voluntarism and the Ethics of Belief
    Res Philosophica 95 (4): 617-636. 2018.
    In the Middle Ages, the view that agents are able to exercise direct voluntary control over their beliefs—doxastic voluntarism—was pervasive. It was held by Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan, among many others. Herein, I show that the somewhat neglected Oxford Dominican, Robert Holcot (†1349), rejected doxastic voluntarism with a coherence and plausibility that reflects and anticipates much contemporary thought on the issue. I, further, suggest that Holcot’s rejection of the idea t…Read more
  •  38
    Why Reid was no dogmatist
    Synthese 196 (11): 4511-4525. 2019.
    According to dogmatism, a perceptual experience with p as its content is always a source of justification for the belief that p. Thomas Reid has been an extant source of inspiration for this view. I argue, however, that, though there is a superficial consonance between Reid’s position and that of the dogmatists, their views are, more fundamentally, at variance with one another. While dogmatists take their position to express a necessary epistemic truth, discernible a priori, Reid holds that if s…Read more