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409Hawthorne’s might-y failure: a reply to “Knowledge and epistemic necessity”Philosophical Studies 173 (5): 1165-1177. 2016.In “Knowledge and epistemic necessity,” John Hawthorne gives a defense of what he rightly calls the “standard approach” to epistemic possibility against what he calls a new “competing idea” presented by Dougherty and Rysiew which he notes has been “endorsed and elaborated upon” by Fantl and McGrath. According to the standard approach, roughly, p is epistemically possible for S if S doesn’t know that not-p. The new approach has it that p is epistemically possible if p has a non-zero epistemic pro…Read more
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Seemings, Reasons, and Knowledge: A Defense of Phenomenal ConservatismIn McCain Kevin (ed.), Believing in Accordance with the Evidence: New Essays on Evidentialism, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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25Skeptical Theism: New Essays (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.This collection of 22 newly-commissioned essays presents cutting-edge work on skeptical theistic responses to the problem of evil and the persistent objections that such responses invite.
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1231Religious EpistemologyPhilosophy Compass 10 (8): 547-559. 2015.Religious epistemology is the study of how subjects' religious beliefs can have, or fail to have, some form of positive epistemic status and whether they even need such status appropriate to their kind. The current debate is focused most centrally upon the kind of basis upon which a religious believer can be rationally justified in holding certain beliefs about God and whether it is necessary to be so justified to believe as a religious believer ought. Engaging these issues are primarily three g…Read more
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27Explanation and the Problem of EvilIn Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley. 2013.Do the evils in the world make it unlikely that God exists? In the first half of this chapter, Paul Draper formulates a Humean argument from evil for an affirmative answer to this question. He compares the theistic hypothesis that an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God exists to a competing hypothesis called naturalism. He claims both that naturalism is simpler than theism, and that naturalism fits or “predicts” a variety of facts about good and evil much better than theism does. Afte…Read more
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329Divine Hiddenness and the Nature of BeliefReligious Studies 43 (2). 2007.In this paper we argue that attention to the intricacies relating to belief illustrate crucial difficulties with Schellenberg's hiddenness argument. This issue has been only tangentially discussed in the literature to date. Yet we judge this aspect of Schellenberg's argument deeply significant. We claim that focus on the nature of belief manifests a central flaw in the hiddenness argument. Additionally, attention to doxastic subtleties provides important lessons about the nature of faith
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378Fallibilism, epistemic possibility, and concessive knowledge attributionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (1): 123-132. 2008.If knowing requires believing on the basis of evidence that entails what’s believed, we have hardly any knowledge at all. Hence the near-universal acceptance of fallibilism in epistemology: if it's true that "we are all fallibilists now" (Siegel 1997: 164), that's because denying that one can know on the basis of non-entailing evidence1is, it seems, not an option if we're to preserve the very strong appearance that we do know many things (Cohen 1988: 91). Hence the significance of concessive kno…Read more
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331Divine Union with and without the Gospel: A Probabilistic Problem of PluralismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1): 135-143. 2019.
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164Clarity about concessive knowledge attributions: reply to DoddSynthese 181 (3): 395-403. 2011.Recently, Dylan Dodd (this Journal ) has tried to clear up what he takes to be some of the many confusions surrounding concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs)—i.e., utterances of the form “S knows that p , but it’s possible that q ” (where q entails not- p ) (Rysiew, Noûs 35(4): 477–514, 2001). Here, we respond to the criticisms Dodd offers of the account of the semantics and the sometime-infelicity of CKAs we have given (Dougherty and Rysiew, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78(1): 121…Read more
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385A user's guide to design argumentsReligious Studies 44 (1): 99-110. 2008.We argue that there is a tension between two types of design arguments-the fine-tuning argument (FTA) and the biological design argument (BDA). The tension arises because the strength of each argument is inversely proportional to the value of a certain currently unknown probability. Since the value of that probability is currently unknown, we investigate the properties of the FTA and BDA on different hypothetical values of this probability. If our central claim is correct this suggests three res…Read more
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32Still Nowhere Else to StartIn Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 25. 2013.
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125What Is Knowledge-first Epistemology?In Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 10. 2013.
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101Experience FirstIn Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 2. 2013.
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22The problem of animal pain: a theodicy for all creatures great and smallPalgrave-Macmillan. 2014.The plan of this book -- The problem of animal pain -- The Bayesian argument from animal pain -- Is there really a problem? the challenge of neo-cartesianism -- There is a problem. the defeat of neo-cartesianism -- The saint-making theodicy I:Negative phase -- The saint-making theodicy II:Positive phase -- Animal saints -- Animal afterlife.
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IntroductionIn Jerry L. Walls Trent Dougherty (ed.), Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project, Oxford University Press. 2018.
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26We Have Liftoff..Journal of Analytic Theology 1. 2013.A brief introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Analytic Theology
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2Parrying Parity: A Reply to a Reidian Critique of IdealismIn K. Pearce & T. Goldschmidt (eds.), Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-17. 2017.One Berkeleyan case for idealism, recently developed by Robert M. Adams, relies on a seeming disparity between our concepts of matter and mind. Thomas Reid’s critique of idealism directly challenges the alleged disparity. After highlighting the role of the disparity thesis in Adams’s updated Berkeleyan argument for idealism, this chapter offers an updated version of Reid’s challenge, and assesses its strength. What emerges from this historico-philosophical investigation is that a contemporary Re…Read more
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3Explanation and the problem of evilIn Justin P. Mcbrayer (ed.), A Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley. pp. 71-87. 2013.
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28Introduction: Special Issue on Religious EpistemologyAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (3): 405-407. 2018.
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68Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence, and the Abundant Life, by Michael Rota (review)Faith and Philosophy 35 (1): 147-153. 2018.
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86Reflections on the Deep Connection Between Problems of Evil and Problems of Divine HiddennessEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4): 65--84. 2016.In the literature on the subject, it is common to understand the problem of divine hiddenness and the problem of evil as distinct problems. Schellenberg and van Inwagen are representative. Such a sharp distinction is not so obvious to me. In this essay, I explore the relationship between the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness.
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1099Reforming reformed epistemology: a new take on the sensus divinitatisReligious Studies 55 (4): 537-557. 2019.Alvin Plantinga theorizes the existence of a sensus divinitatis – a special cognitive faulty or mechanism dedicated to the production and non-inferential justification of theistic belief. Following Chris Tucker, we offer an evidentialist-friendly model of the sensus divinitatis whereon it produces theistic seemings that non-inferentially justify theistic belief. We suggest that the sensus divinitatis produces these seemings by tacitly grasping support relations between the content of ordinary ex…Read more
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317John Haldane. Reasonable Faith. Routledge, 2010European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 3 (1): 239--242. 2011.
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938Natural Theology, Evidence, and Epistemic HumilityEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (2): 19-42. 2017.One not infrequently hears rumors that the robust practice of natural theology reeks of epistemic pride. Paul Moser’s is a paradigm of such contempt. In this paper we defend the robust practice of natural theology from the charge of epistemic pride. In taking an essentially Thomistic approach, we argue that the evidence of natural theology should be understood as a species of God’s general self-revelation. Thus, an honest assessment of that evidence need not be prideful, but can be an act of epi…Read more
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144FallibilismIn Duncan Pritchard & Sven Bernecker (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. 2011.Fallibilism in epistemology is neither identical to nor unrelated to the ordinary notion of fallibility. In ordinary life we are forced to the conclusion that human beings are prone to error. The epistemological doctrine of fallibilism, though, is about the consistency of holding that humans have knowledge while admitting certain limitations in human ways of knowing. As will be seen, making the content of the basic intuition more precise is both somewhat contentious and the key to an adequate de…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Religion |
Philosophy of Probability |
PhilPapers Editorships
Evidentialism |