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Knowledge, practical interests, and rising tidesIn David K. Henderson & John Greco (eds.), Epistemic Evaluation: Purposeful Epistemology, Oxford University Press Uk. 2015.
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10What It Takes to Live PhilosophicallyIn James M. Ambury, Tushar Irani & Kathleen Wallace (eds.), Philosophy as a way of life: historical, contemporary, and pedagogical perspectives, Wiley. 2020-10-05.This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay arg…Read more
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IntroductionIn Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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The Ethics of UnderstandingIn Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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701What is philosophy as a way of life? Why philosophy as a way of life?European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 236-251. 2020.Despite a recent surge of interest in philosophy as a way of life, it is not clear what it might mean for philosophy to guide one's life, or how a “philosophical” way of life might differ from a life guided by religion, tradition, or some other source. We argue against John Cooper that spiritual exercises figure crucially in the idea of philosophy as a way of life—not just in the ancient world but also today, at least if the idea is to be viable. In order to make the case we attempt to clarify …Read more
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1002Understanding as an Epistemic GoalDissertation, University of Notre Dame. 2005.Among epistemologists and philosophers of science, one often hears that someone with understanding is able to “see” or “grasp” how the elements of a subject “cohere” or “fit together”—but just what is involved in the seeing or the grasping is usually left to the imagination. I argue that the most productive way to make progress on this issue is by first identifying the kind of explanation-seeking why-questions that drive the search for understanding in the first place. In particular, I suggest…Read more
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1392What It Takes to Live Philosophically: Or, How to Progress in the Art of LivingMetaphilosophy 51 (2-3): 391-410. 2020.This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are correct. The essay arg…Read more
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19Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives From Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (edited book)Oup Usa. 2019.In this volume some of the leading philosophers, psychologists, and theologians in the world shed light on the various ways in which we understand the world, pushing debates on this issue to new levels of sophistication and insight.
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31Does Adversity Make Us Wiser Than Before? Addressing a Foundational Question Through Interdisciplinary EngagementJournal of Value Inquiry 53 (3): 343-348. 2019.
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673Transmitting Understanding and Know-HowIn Stephen Hetherington & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, Routledge. 2020.Among contemporary epistemologists and scholars of ancient philosophy, one often hears that transmitting propositional knowledge by testimony is usually easy and straightforward, but transmitting understanding and know-how by testimony is usually difficult or simply impossible. Further provocative conclusions are then sometimes drawn from these claims: for instance, that know-how and understanding are not types of propositional knowledge. In contrast, I argue that transmitting propositional kn…Read more
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109Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.This collection offers original work on the nature of understanding by a range of distinguished philosophers. Although some of the essays are by scholars well known for their work on understanding, many of the essays bring entirely new figures to the discussion.
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252The goal of explanationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (4): 337-344. 2010.I defend the claim that understanding is the goal of explanation against various persistent criticisms, especially the criticism that understanding is not truth-connected in the appropriate way, and hence is a merely psychological state. Part of the reason why understanding has been dismissed as the goal of explanation, I suggest, is because the psychological dimension of the goal of explanation has itself been almost entirely neglected. In turn, the psychological dimension of understanding—the …Read more
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825Understanding as an Intellectual VirtueIn Battaly Heather (ed.), Routledge Companion to Virtue Epistemology, Routledge. 2019.In this paper I elucidate various ways in which understanding can be seen as an excellence of the mind or intellectual virtue. Along the way, I take up the neglected issue of what it might mean to be an “understanding person”—by which I mean not a person who understands a number of things about the natural world, but a person who steers clear of things like judgmentalism in her evaluation of other people, and thus is better able to take up different perspectives and view them with a sympathetic…Read more
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658Why Study History? On Its Epistemic Benefits and Its Relation to the SciencesPhilosophy 92 (3): 399-420. 2017.I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact that bo…Read more
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541The Value of UnderstandingPhilosophy Compass 7 (2): 103-117. 2012.Over the last several years a number of leading philosophers – including Catherine Elgin, Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Duncan Pritchard – have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the contemporary focus on knowledge in epistemology and have attempted to “recover” the notion of understanding. According to some of these philosophers, in fact, understanding deserves not just to be recovered, but to supplant knowledge as the focus of epistemological inquiry. This entry considers some of th…Read more
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166How Understanding People Differs from Understanding the Natural WorldPhilosophical Issues 26 (1): 209-225. 2016.
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143Cardinal Newman, Reformed Epistemologist?American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (4): 497-522. 2001.Despite the recent claims of some prominent Catholic philosophers, I argue that Cardinal Newman's writings are in fact largely compatible with the contemporary movement in the philosophy of religion known as Reformed Epistemology, and in particular with the work of Alvin Plantinga. I first show how the thought of both Newman and Plantinga was molded in response to the "evidentialist" claims of John Locke. I then examine the details of Newman's response, especially as seen in his Essay in Aid of …Read more
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254What Is Interesting?Logos and Episteme 2 (4): 515-542. 2011.In this paper I consider what it is that makes certain topics or questions epistemically interesting. Getting clear about this issue, I argue, is not only interesting in its own right, but also helps to shed light on increasingly important and perplexing questions in the epistemological literature: e.g., questions concerning how to think about ‘the epistemic point of view,’ as well as questions concerning what is most worthy of our intellectual attention and why.
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62Review of Duncan Pritchard, Alan Millar, Adrian Haddock, The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011 (2). 2011.
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1360Epistemic NormativityIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic value, Oxford University Press. pp. 243-264. 2009.In this article, from the 2009 Oxford University Press collection Epistemic Value, I criticize existing accounts of epistemic normativity by Alston, Goldman, and Sosa, and then offer a new view.
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733I explore the extent to which the epistemic state of understanding is transparent to the one who understands. Against several contemporary epistemologists, I argue that it is not transparent in the way that many have claimed, drawing on results from developmental psychology, animal cognition, and other fields.
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2046UnderstandingIn D. Pritchard S. Berneker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2011.This entry offers a critical overview of the contemporary literature on understanding, especially in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
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753Is understanding a species of knowledge?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (3): 515-535. 2006.Among philosophers of science there seems to be a general consensus that understanding represents a species of knowledge, but virtually every major epistemologist who has thought seriously about understanding has come to deny this claim. Against this prevailing tide in epistemology, I argue that understanding is, in fact, a species of knowledge: just like knowledge, for example, understanding is not transparent and can be Gettiered. I then consider how the psychological act of "grasping" that se…Read more
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65Easy cases and value incommensurabilityRatio 20 (1). 2007.Several critics have denied value incommensurability – or the claim, roughly, that there is no common measure in terms of which values can be weighed – on the basis of what we might call the argument from easy cases. Although the argument from easy cases is quite popular, what is much less often discussed is what exactly the argument entails – in other words, what sort of further commitments the argument generates. Suppose we grant that easy cases point to the existence of a common measure. How …Read more
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335Wisdom in TheologyIn William and Frederick Abraham and Aquino (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, . forthcoming.
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543The Logic of MysticismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (2): 109--123. 2015.I argue that mystical experience essentially involves two aspects: an element of direct encounter with God, and an element of union with God. The framework I use to make sense of is taken largely from William Alston’s magisterial book Perceiving God. While I believe Alston’s view is correct in many essentials, the main problem with the account is that it divorces the idea of encountering or perceiving God from the idea of being united with God. What I argue, on the contrary, is that because our …Read more
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179Ernest Sosa, knowledge, and understandingPhilosophical Studies 106 (3): 171--191. 2001.This paper offers and analysis of Ernest Sosa's Virtue Perspectivism. Although Sosa has been credited with fathering the influential contemporary movement known as Virtue Epistemology, I argue that Sosa imprudently abandons the reliabilist-based insights of Virtue Epistemology in favor of a reflection-based, "perspectival"' view. Sosa's mixed allegiance to reliabilist-based and reflection-based views of knowledge, in fact, leads to an unwelcome tension in his thought which can be relieved by rec…Read more
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