•  23
    Cycling and Philosophical Lessons Learned the Hard Way
    In Fritz Allhoff, Jesús Ilundáin‐Agurruza & Michael W. Austin (eds.), Cycling ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Riding Out of the Cave Discipline and Diet Toughing It Out Surprises Down the Road From Tribulation to Wisdom Notes.
  •  5
    Luck Attributions and Cognitive Bias
    with Jennifer Adrienne Johnson
    In Duncan Pritchard & Lee John Whittington (eds.), The Philosophy of Luck, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.
    Philosophers have developed three theories of luck: the probability theory, the modal theory, and the control theory. To help assess these theories, we conducted an empirical investigation of luck attributions. We created eight putative luck scenarios and framed each in either a positive or a negative light. Furthermore, we placed the critical luck event at the beginning, middle, or end of the scenario to see if the location of the event influenced luck attributions. We found that attributions o…Read more
  •  46
    Putting Claus Back into Christmas
    In Fritz Allhoff & Scott C. Lowe (eds.), Christmas ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Nietzsche's Useful Fictions The Commercial Origins of Christmas Santa Claus and the Social Compact The Spirit of Giving and the True Meaning of Christmas.
  •  3
    A Trilemma for Philosophical Knowledge
    In René Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge: Papers in Epistemology, De Gruyter. pp. 131-144. 2005.
  •  55
    Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1): 229-233. 1994.
  •  18
    Value Pluralism in Restoration Aesthetics
    British Journal of Aesthetics. forthcoming.
    In the restoration of art and artifacts there are three salient types of value to consider: relic, aesthetic, and practical. Relic value includes an object’s age, aura, originality, authenticity, and epistemic value. Aesthetic value is connected to how an object looks, sounds, or tastes. Practical value involves whether a thing can be used as designed—whether a book can be read, a building occupied, a car driven. I argue that while these are all legitimate values, it is impossible for a restorer…Read more
  • Cognitive biases and dispositions in luck attributions
    with Jennifer Adrienne Johnson
    In Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck, Routledge. 2019.
  •  10
    Audiophile aesthetics
    American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2): 195-208. 2017.
    What little work has been done on high fidelity/audiophile aesthetics uniformly agrees that the aesthetic aim of high fidelity is to achieve maximum transparency—the degree to which the listening experience is qualitatively identical to hearing the live instruments. The present paper argues that due to modern recording techniques, transparency is often impossible and may not be the proper aesthetic goal even in cases of documentary recordings. Instead, audiophilia should be understood as a broad…Read more
  •  29
    Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck—novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics—and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probabi…Read more
  •  8
    Virtue Epistemology and the Value of Knowledge
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 75 109-113. 2018.
    Virtue epistemologists like Ernest Sosa and John Greco have attempted to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. In this talk I demonstrate that both of their accounts fail so profoundly that it is difficult to see how virtue epistemology alone contains the resources to explain the value of knowledge. According to the virtue theoretic approach, knowledge is a kind of success from ability. Knowledge constitutes a competent epistemic performance, and some performances are bet…Read more
  •  8
    Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely
    Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 737-740. 1995.
  •  428
    Nietzsche’s Epistemic Perspectivism
    In Michela Massimi (ed.), Knowledge From a Human Point of View, Springer Verlag. pp. 19-34. 2019.
    Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and those who interpret him as a skeptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls per- spectivism. This is a familiar take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. The present paper presents a sketch of the textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a first- order epistemic theory. What’s original in the present paper is an argument that Nietzsche…Read more
  •  244
    Moral Luck and Control
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1): 42-58. 2019.
    There is no such thing as moral luck or everyone is profoundly mistaken about its nature and a radical rethinking of moral luck is needed. The argument to be developed is not complicated, and relies almost entirely on premises that should seem obviously correct to anyone who follows the moral luck literature. The conclusion, however, is surprising and disturbing. The classic cases of moral luck always involve an agent who lacks control over an event whose occurrence affects her praiseworthiness …Read more
  •  21
    Dispositional optimism and luck attributions: Implications for philosophical theories of luck
    with Jennifer Adrienne Johnson
    Philosophical Psychology 31 (7): 1027-1045. 2018.
    ABSTRACTWe conducted two studies to determine whether there is a relationship between dispositional optimism and the attribution of good or bad luck to ambiguous luck scenarios. Study 1 presented five scenarios that contained both a lucky and an unlucky component, thereby making them ambiguous in regard to being an overall case of good or bad luck. Participants rated each scenario in toto on a four-point Likert scale and then completed an optimism questionnaire. The results showed a significant …Read more
  •  21
    The Recurring Problem of the Third Man
    Auslegung 17 (1): 67-80. 1991.
  •  184
    Time for Change
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 45 (4): 497-513. 2007.
    Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurancestyle accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limite…Read more
  •  222
    A proof of the existence of fairies
    Think 6 (16): 45. 2008.
    Here is the third of our three responses to Dawkins's The God Delusion
  •  7
    Luck: Its Nature and Significance for Human Knowledge and Responsibility
    Philosophical Quarterly 66 (265): 859-862. 2016.
  •  8
    What to Do about Incommensurable Doxastic Perspectives
    Philosophia Christi 11 (1): 201-206. 2009.
    The present paper is a response to the criticisms that Mark McLeod-Harrison makes of my book Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. If secular, intuition-driven rationalist philosophy yields a belief that p, and Christian, revelation-driven epistemic methods yield a belief that not-p, what should we do? Following Alston, McLeod-Harrison argues that Christian philosophers need do nothing, and remains confident that their way is the best. I argue that this is a serious epistemic mistake, an…Read more
  •  13
    Epistemic Closure Principles
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (2): 185-202. 1995.
  • On the Possibility of Epistemic Certainty a Posteriori
    Dissertation, Brown University. 1992.
    The general project of this dissertation is to defend the logical possibility of some human knowledge being held with certainty. I argue that intentional and phenomenal states, while known a posteriori, nevertheless have been historically held in high epistemic esteem. Traditionally they have been considered such that if anything is known with certainty, they are. Recent attempts, especially from considerations in semantics and the philosophy of mind, to undermine the authority of intentional an…Read more
  •  75
    Nietzsche, Perspectivism, and Mental Health
    with Rex Welshon
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology 6 (3): 173-177. 1999.
    This paper is a response to Ronald Lehrer's "Perspectivism and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy". Lehrer treats Nietzsche as promoting only a modest perspectivism according to which different cognitive strategies triangulate the truth. We argue that Nietzsche's perspectivism is much more radical, and defensible, than Lehrer admits. We also suggest that Nietzsche's bundle theory of the self has important implications for psychotherapy and the concept of mental health. According to this theory, the sel…Read more
  •  91
    There are five basic ways to resolve disagreements: keep arguing until capitulation, compromise, locate an ambiguity or contextual factors, accept Pyrrhonian skepticism, and adopt relativism. Relativism is perhaps the most radical and least popular solution to a disagreement, and its defenders generally think the best motivator for relativism is to be found in disputes over predicates of personal taste. I argue that taste predicates do not adequately motivate relativism over the other possible s…Read more
  •  3
    Certainty and Phenomenal States
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 57-72. 1994.
    The sort of knowledge we have with regard to the nature and kind of our own phenomenal states has enjoyed considerable prestige in the history of philosophy. Hume claims that ‘The only existences, of which we are certain, are perceptions, which being immediately present to us by consciousness, command our strongest assent, and are the first foundation of all our conclusions’. In the New Essays, Leibniz remarks that ‘if the immediate inner experience is not certain, we cannot be sure of any truth…Read more
  •  61
    What to do about incommensurable doxastic perspectives
    Philosophia Christi 11 (1): 209-214. 2009.
    The present paper is a response to the criticisms that Mark McLeod-Harrison makes of my book Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. If secular, intuition-driven rationalist philosophy yields a belief that p, and Christian, revelation-driven epistemic methods yield a belief that not-p, what should we do? Following Alston, McLeod-Harrison argues that Christian philosophers need do nothing, and remains confident that their way is the best. I argue that this is a serious epistemic mistake, an…Read more
  •  141
    A Companion to Relativism (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 2010.
    _A Companion to Relativism_ presents original contributions from leading scholars that address the latest thinking on the role of relativism in the philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics. Features original contributions from many of the leading figures working on various aspects of relativism Presents a substantial, broad range of current thinking about relativism Addresses relativism from many of the major subfields of philosophy, including p…Read more
  •  21
    The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 44 (175): 254. 1994.
  •  65
    Reply to Licon on Time Travel
    Logos and Episteme 2 (4): 633-636. 2011.
    In this paper I offer a rejoinder to the criticisms raised by Jimmy Alfonso Licon in “No Suicide for Presentists: A Response to Hales.” I argue that Licon's concerns are misplaced, and that his hypothetical presentist time machine neither travels in time nor saves the life of the putative traveler. I conclude that sensible time travel is still forbidden to presentists