T. Ryan Byerly

In a recent book and journal article, I have developed an account of intellectual transparency as an other-regarding intellectual virtue, and have explored its conceptual relationship to the virtue of honesty. This paper aims to further advance understanding of intellectual transparency by examining some of the ways in which the trait is instrumentally valuable. Specifically, I argue that intellectual transparency tends to enhance its possessor’s close personal relationships, work performance, and civic engagement. On account of their intellectual transparency, the intellectually transparent person is likely to enjoy better quality, more satisfied personal relationships such as romantic relationships and friendships. They are likely to contribute to better work outcomes, especially when working in a team context. And, they are likely to be more civically active and to promote epistemic values of democratic deliberation.

This robust, clear, and well-researched textbook for classes in logic introduces students to both formal logic and to the virtues of intellectual inquiry. Part 1 challenges students to develop the analytical skills of deductive and inductive reasoning, showing them how to identify and evaluate arguments. Part 2 helps students develop the intellectual virtues of the wise inquirer. The book includes helpful pedagogical features such as practice exercises and a concluding summary with definitions of key concepts for each chapter. Resources for professors and students are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.

The purpose of this paper is to advance understanding of intellectually virtuous honesty, by examining the relationship between a recent account of intellectual honesty and a recent account of intellectual transparency. The account of intellectual honesty comes from Nathan King, who adapts the work of Christian Miller on moral honesty, while the account of intellectual transparency comes from T. Ryan Byerly. After introducing the respective accounts, I identify four potential differences between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency as understood by these accounts. I then turn to the question of how to think about the relationship between these traits in light of these potential differences. I make the case that intellectual transparency can either be regarded as an exceptionally strong or ideal variety of intellectual honesty, or it can be regarded as a distinct virtue from intellectual honesty which is a more cardinal virtue than the latter. Along the way, I also note some places where a case can be made that Miller's and King's accounts of honesty and intellectual honesty are in need of refinement or clarification.

Philosophical reflection on transparency, including group transparency, is beginning to gain steam. This paper contributes to this work by developing a conceptualization of transparency as an intellectual character trait that groups can possess, and by presenting a novel argument for thinking that such transparency should be understood along non-summativist lines. According to the account offered, a group’s being intellectually transparent consists in the group’s tending to attend well to its perspective and to share its perspective faithfully with others in order to promote their epistemic goods. It is argued that this kind of group intellectual transparency, pace summativism, does not always consist merely in group members possessing intellectual transparency. The argument given for this conclusion works differently from existing arguments for non-summativism about group character traits, and it retains persuasive power even if summativist views of most group phenomena, including other group character traits, are correct.

This book offers a multifaceted exploration of death and the possibilities for an afterlife. By incorporating a variety of approaches to these subjects, it provides a unique framework for extending and reshaping enduring philosophical debates around human existence up to and after death. Featuring original essays from a diverse group of international scholars, the book is arranged in four main sections. Firstly, it addresses how death is or should be experienced, engaging with topics such as near-death experiences, continuing bonds with the deceased, and attitudes toward dying. Secondly, it looks at surviving death, addressing the metaphysics of human persons, the nature of time, the nature of the true self, and the nature of the divine. It then evaluates the value of mortality and immortality, drawing upon the resources of the history of philosophy, meta-analysis of contemporary debates, and the analogy between individual death and species extinction. Finally, it explores what an eternal life might be like, examining the place of selflessness, embodiment, and racial identity in such a life. This volume allows for a variety of philosophical and theological perspectives to be brought to bear on the end of life and what might be beyond. As such, it will be a fascinating resource for scholars in the Philosophy of Religion, Theology and Death Studies.

Intellectual Dependability is the first research monograph devoted to addressing the question of what it is to be an intellectually dependable person--the sort of person on whom one's fellow inquirers can depend in their pursuit of epistemic goods. While neglected in recent scholarship, this question is an important one for both epistemology--how we should conceptualize the ideal inquirer--and education--how we can enable developing learners to grow toward this ideal. The book defends a virtue theory according to which being an intellectually dependable person is distinctively a matter of possessing a suite of neglected virtues called "the virtues of intellectual dependability" that are themselves distinctively concerned with promoting epistemic goods in others' inquiries. After defending the existence and educational significance of these virtues as a group, the book turns toward the project of identifying and conceptualizing several specific instances of these virtues in detail. Virtues discussed include intellectual benevolence, intellectual transparency, communicative clarity, audience sensitivity, and epistemic guidance. In each case, an interdisciplinary treatment of the nature of the virtue and its relationship to other virtues, vices, and personality features is offered, drawing especially on relevant research in Philosophy and Psychology. The book concludes with a chapter devoted to identifying distinctive ways these virtues of intellectual dependability are manifested when it is inquiring communities, rather than individuals, that occupy the position of intellectual dependence. By directing attention to the ideal of intellectual dependability, the book marks a novel turn of scholarly interest explicitly toward a neglected dimension of the ideal inquirer that will inform both epistemological theorizing and educational practice.

Many pantheists have claimed that their view of the divine is motivated by a kind of spiritual experience. In this paper, I articulate a novel argument, inspired by recent work on moral exemplarism, that gives voice to this kind of motivation for pantheism. The argument is based on two claims about the emotion of awe, each of which is defended primarily via critical engagement with empirical research on the emotion. I also illustrate how this pathway to pantheism offers pantheists distinctive resources for responding to persistent objections to their view, and how it might lead to more exotic views incorporating pantheistic elements.

Moral character and ascetic practice have not been major themes in contemporary analytic religious epistemology, but they have been major themes in the religious epistemologies of several influential historical figures, including the medieval Islamic philosopher al-Ghazalı. This article will be concerned with the place of moral character and ascetic practice in both al-Ghazalı’s religious epistemology and in contemporary analytic religious epistemology. By reading al-Ghazalı alongside contemporary work, I aim to highlight some fruitful ideas about how moral character and ascetic practice could play important roles in religious epistemology. I argue that the exploration of these ideas may be enriched via engagement with recent developments in mainstream epistemology and virtue theory, pointing toward future avenues for such work.

Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven systematically investigates heaven, or paradise, as conceived within theistic religious traditions such as Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It considers a variety of topics concerning what life in paradise would, could, or will be like for human persons. The collection offers novel approaches to questions about heaven of perennial philosophical interest, and breaks new ground by expanding the range of questions about heaven that philosophers have considered. The contributors wrestle with questions about human life in paradise that span the spectrum of the major subfields of philosophical enquiry. By employing both historical and contemporary philosophical resources, the volume makes a pioneering contribution toward answering pressing questions about human life in paradise. It will serve as a platform for future research, reinvigorating philosophical investigation into these neglected topics within philosophy of religion.

This paper employs recent developments in the theory of truthmakers to offer a novel solution to the most discussed philosophical challenge presented by the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. According to the view developed, the Father, Son, and Spirit each serve as the only substantial constituent of equally minimal truthmakers for claims about God. Because they do, there is a clear and robust sense in which each is a substance that “is” God as much as anything is, while the three remain distinct from each other. The view is shown to hold certain prima facie advantages over rival extant approaches.

Introductory-level undergraduate classes in Logic or Critical Thinking are a staple in the portfolio of many Philosophy programs. A standard approach to these classes is to include teaching and learning activities focused on formal deductive and inductive logic, sometimes accompanied by teaching and learning activities focused on informal fallacies or argument construction. In this article, I discuss a proposal to include an additional element within these classes—namely, teaching and learning activities focused on intellectual virtues. After clarifying the proposal, I identify three reasons in favor of implementing it and I discuss how to implement it, focusing on questions about pedagogical strategies and pedagogical resources.

When deciding what to do, is it best to treat one's own interests as more important than the interests of others, others' interests as more important than one's own, or one's own and others' interests as equally important? This book develops an account of others-centeredness, a way of putting others first in the process of deciding what to do. Over the course of six chapters, Putting Others First investigates other-centeredness by drawing upon a wide range of academic disciplines including biblical studies, feminist scholarship, philosophy, psychology, and theology. The author begins by explaining the nature of others-centeredness as a character trait in detail and connecting it with other contemporary projects in virtue theory. He argues that foundational texts of the New Testament can be plausibly read as advocating for others-centeredness. He then develops a provisional case for the value of others-centeredness from the perspective of each of the three major approaches to normative ethics: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. Next, the author confronts challenging questions about the value of others-centeredness, including whether others-centeredness requires an impossibly strong sort of altruism, whether it leads its possessors into self-destructive relationships, and whether it leads to offering help that hurts others. Finally, he examines the place of others-centeredness within a person's moral psychology by considering the relationship between it and other virtues and vices, and reviews relevant scientific findings that illuminate the value and causal role of others-centeredness.

Cosmological arguments for the existence of God face a gap problem. This is the problem of convincingly arguing that their intermediate conclusions that some first cause or necessary being exists provide evidence for their main conclusion that God exists. This paper develops a simple and innovative approach to solving this problem, applicable to many cosmological arguments. According to the proposal, the best explanation for why the necessary being is found to have necessary existence is that it is a perfect being. Since a perfect being would be God, the intermediate conclusions of the relevant cosmological arguments provide abductive evidence for their main conclusions.

This paper argues that there is significant motivation for contemporary ethicists to affirm a view I call “moral property eliminativism.” On this eliminativist view, there are no moral properties, but there are moral truths that are made true by only nonmoral entities. Moral property eliminativism parallels eliminativist views defended in other domains of philosophical inquiry, but has gone nearly entirely overlooked by contemporary ethicists. I argue that moral property eliminativism is motivated by the claim that there cannot be differences in moral truths without differences in nonmoral ontology—a claim widely endorsed by contemporary ethicists. Engaging with a variety of ways whereby one might resist the motivation I cite for moral property eliminativism, I argue that alternative contemporary metaethical views tend to purchase moral properties at the price of unnecessary theoretical complexity.

It is not uncommon to think that the existence of exhaustive and infallible divine foreknowledge uniquely threatens the existence of human freedom. This paper shows that this cannot be so. For, to uniquely threaten human freedom, infallible divine foreknowledge would have to make an essential contribution to an explanation for why our actions are not up to us. And infallible divine foreknowledge cannot do this. There remains, however, an important question about the compatibility of freedom and foreknowledge. It is a question not about the existence of foreknowledge, but about its mechanics.

This paper presents and defends a model of religious faith as an epistemic disposition. According to the model, religious faith is a disposition to take certain doxastic attitudes toward propositions of religious significance upon entertaining certain mental states. Three distinct advantages of the model are advanced. First, the model allows for religious faith to explain the presence and epistemic appropriateness of religious belief. Second, the model accommodates a variety of historically significant perspectives concerning the relationships between faith and evidence, faith and volition, and faith and doubt. And, finally, the model offers an appealing account of what unifies religious faith with other kinds of faith.

Suppose you confront a situation in which you can either promote a good for yourself or a good for someone else, but not both. The present paper argues that it is valuable for your conduct in such circumstances to be regulated by a character trait the possession of which constitutes one way of having one’s life be centered upon others as opposed to centered upon oneself. The trait in question, which we shall call “others-centeredness,” is a disposition to promote goods of others rather than one’s own goods when the values of these goods are equal or incommensurable. We argue that possessing this trait makes one more likely to maximize total value, because in addition to promoting the goods of the other, this trait also promotes goods of interpersonal union. We explain why this conclusion is significant, and we defend our argument for it against several objections.

Explanationism holds that a person's evidence supports a proposition just in case that proposition is part of the best available explanation for the person's evidence. I argue that explanationism faces a serious difficulty when it comes to justified beliefs about the future. Often, one's evidence supports some proposition about the future but that proposition is not part of the best available explanation for one's evidence. Attempts to defend explanationism against this charge are unattractive. Moving to a modified better contrastive explanation account will help with these cases, but it will face other difficulties

Presentists claim that only presently existing objects exist. One version of presentism is ersatzer presentism, according to which times are a kind of abstract object. Such a view is appealing because it affords the presentist an answer to the grounding objection—a potentially lethal objection to presentism. Despite this advantage, available versions of ersatzer presentism suffer from a heretofore unappreciated shortcoming: they cannot account for the truth of certain counterfactual claims about the past. We argue for this claim by considering two views representative of ersatzer presentism—those of Thomas Crisp and Craig Bourne. After presenting our arguments against their views, we defend two crucial assumptions in those arguments. Finally, we offer a novel version of ersatzer presentism that appropriates the metaphysics of constitution in order to avoid the difficulty that current ersatzer presentist views face.