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61. Philo: Volume > 13 > Issue: 1
Eric Reitan

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When philosophers contribute to public debates as polarized as contemporary ones about theistic belief, it is common to encounter responses that, philosophically, are woefully misguided. While it is tempting to simply dismiss them, a closer examination of recurring responses can offer insight of philosophical significance. In this paper I exemplify the value of engaging with recurring but misguided popular objections by looking carefully at one such objection to my recent book, Is God a Delusion?

book review

62. Philo: Volume > 13 > Issue: 1
Mark Bernstein

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63. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Paul Pistone

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64. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Peter Byrne

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This paper surveys the argument that a secular world-view that is committed to a neo-Darwinian account of human origins generates a vicious form of moral skepticism. The argument turns around the claim that Darwinism entails the unreliability of moral sense or conscience. This argument is analyzed and found wanting. It rests on a major error about the scope of evolutionary biology in explaining human thought.

65. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Paul Churchland

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Alvin Plantinga argues that our cognitive mechanisms have been selected for their ability to sustain reproductively successful behaviors, not for their ability to track truth. This aspect of our cognitive mechanisms is said to pose a problem for the biological theory of evolution by natural selection in the following way. If our cognitive mechanisms do not provide any assurances that the theories generated by them are true, then the fact that evolutionary theory has been generated by them, and even accepted by them, provides no assurance whatever that evolutionary theory is true. Plantinga’s argument, I argue, innocently assumes that the (problematic) “truth-tracking character” of our native cognitive mechanisms is the only possible or available source of rational warrant or justification for evolutionary theory. But it isn’t. Plantinga is ignoring the artificial mechanisms for theorycreation and theory-evaluation embodied in the complex institutions andprocedures of modern science.

66. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Robin Collins

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This paper argues that theism and related axiarchic hypotheses provide the only promising solution to the problems of cosmic coincidence and induction raised by necessitarians against the regularity view of the laws of nature. Hence, it is argued, the fundamental order of the world provides significant support for theism and these related hypotheses.

67. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
John Leslie

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The paper develops a Platonic and Spinozistic metaphysics. With an unprovable yet absolute necessity, the cosmos exists just because of the ethical need for it. We, and all the intricate structures of our universe, exist as intricately structured thoughts in a divine mind. This mind could contain infinitely many other universes as well, and minds of the same kind could exist in infinite number. Evidence for this is supplied by the finely tuned orderliness of our universe, and by the sheer fact that any universe exists.

68. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Andrew Melnyk

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I develop the conjecture that “naturalism” in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like Thomas Kuhn’s sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-to-day investigative practice. I take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them.

69. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Graham Oppy

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Hypotheses about the shape of causal reality admit of both theistic and non-theistic interpretations. I argue that, on the simplest hypotheses about the causal shape of reality—infinite regress, contingent initial boundary, necessary initial boundary—there is good reason to suppose that non-theism is always either preferable to, or at least the equal of, theism, at least insofar as we restrict our attention merely to the domain of explanation of existence. Moreover, I suggest that it is perfectly proper for naturalists to be undecided between these simple hypotheses about the causal shape of reality: contrary to the proponents of cosmological arguments, there are no decisive objections to any of these simple hypotheses. (I argue this case in detail in connection with objections offered by William Lane Craig; however, I believe that the case holds quite generally.)

70. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
Peter van Inwagen

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This paper examines the so-called modal ontological argument. It pays special attention to the role that the symmetry and transitivity of the accessibility relation play in the argument, and examines various approaches to a defense of the “possibility premise,” the premise of the argument that states that the existence of a perfect being is metaphysically possible. It contains an analysis of Gödel’s attempt to show that this premise is true, and of a recent formulation by David Johnson of Gödel’s argument.

71. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 2
William Wainwright

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In a series of influential articles published in the 1980s, Thomas Morris argued that the most promising approach to many issues in the philosophy of religion is “perfect being theology.” A philosopher who adopts it begins by construing God as a maximally perfect being and then fills the conception in by using his or her modal intuitions and intuitions concerning what properties are and are not perfections. While I am sympathetic with Morris’s program, two aspects seem problematic. More justification is needed for construing God as a maximally perfect being, and the appeal to intuitions needs more support than Morris provides for it. I will comment on both difficulties.

the meaning of life

72. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Joshua W. Seachris

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Even if the question, “What is the meaning of life?” is coherent, the fact remains that it is vague. Its vagueness largely centers on the use of the term “meaning.” The most prevalent strategy for addressing this vagueness is to discard the word “meaning” and reformulate the question entirely into questions such as, “What is the purpose of life?” or “What makes life valuable?” among others. This approach has philosophical merit but does not account for the intuitions and sub-questions driving the original question as plausibly as does an interpretation that I call the narrative interpretation. I will argue that the question, “What is the meaning of life?” should be understood as the request for a narrative that narrates across those elements and accompanying questions of life of greatest existential import to human beings.
73. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Jim D. Shelton

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This paper discusses the views of Moritz Schlick connecting aesthetics with the meaning of life. The fundamental question that Schlick asks is how anything appears beautiful. The discussion of the beautiful comes down to a discussion of aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic pleasure has the characteristic of having no use defined in survival terms of self-preservation and propagation. Art, for Schlick, is seen as essentially play. Schlick addressed how his view that connects aesthetic pleasure and play essentially to the non-useful, can be explained in light of the theory of natural selection. Then this is related to the meaning of life as play or youth.

metaethical naturalism?

74. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Matthew Carey Jordan

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Critics of theological accounts of the nature of morality have argued that such accounts must be rejected, even by theists, because such accounts (i) have the unacceptable implication that nothing is morally wrong in possible worlds in which atheism is true, (ii) render the substantive content of morality arbitrary, and (iii) make it impossible or redundant to attribute moral properties to God or God’s actions. I argue that none of these criticisms constitute good reason for theists to abandon theological accounts of the nature of morality.
75. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Sanford Levy

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There has long been interest in deriving evaluative conclusions from nonevaluative premises. I revisit two classic attempts at this derivation by Philippa Foot and John Searle. They try the derivation using “thick arguments.” I argue that all thick arguments fail. Their failure is not due to a special feature of morality or of moral language, as many critics have charged. Rather it is because the thick evaluative terms are theoretical terms.

mind and body

76. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
D.S. Clarke

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This paper is an interpretation and defense of Putnam’s claim that reductionist sentences identifying experiences with physical events or processes are meaningless. Discourses are formulated within frameworks that are characterized by their methods of justification, types of term introduction, and vocabularies. Examples of both meaningful intra-framework and meaningless cross-framework identities are considered, along with examples of theoretical identities across sub-frameworks. In agreement with Putnam, mental/physical identities are classified as cross-framework. But I qualify Putnam’s thesis by arguing that they can be meaningful to theextent they provide guides to beneficial social actions.’

metaethical naturalism?

77. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Agnieszka Rostalska, Rafal Urbaniak

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This paper evaluates Richard Swinburne’s modal argument for the existence of souls. After a brief presentation of the argument, wedescribe the main known objection to it, which is called the substitution objection (SO for short), and explain Swinburne’s response to that objection. With this as background, we formalize Swinburne’s argument in a quantified propositional modal language, modifying it so that it is logically valid and contains no tacit assumptions, and we explain why we find Swinburne’s response to SO unsatisfactory. Next, we indicate that, even though SO is quite compelling, a weakening of one of the premises yields a valid argument for the same conclusion which is immune to SO. This version of the argument, however, is epistemically circular.

critical study

78. Philo: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Christopher Grau

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This study offers a comprehensive summary and critical discussion of Alice Crary’s Beyond Moral Judgment. While generally sympathetic to her goal of defending the sort of expansive vision of the moral previously championed by Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch, concerns are raised regarding the potential for her account to provide a satisfactory treatment of both “wide” objectivity and moral disagreement. Drawing on the work of Jonathan Lear and Jonathan Dancy, I suggest possible routes by which her position could be expanded and possibly strengthened.

articles

79. Philo: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Wesley Cooper

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This essay continues Kafka’s tale of a human being who metamorphoses into a beetle. The tale is developed in the light of some recent theory about personal identity and rational choice, particularly Robert Nozick’s Closest-Continuer theory and Mark Johnston’s Relativism about the self. These are potentially complementary conceptions of relativity about the self, Nozick’s focusing on the individual’s ‘metric’ as a criterion of personal continuity, Johnston’s on social standards. When the individually authentic determination about ‘closeness’ coincides with the community’s standards for continuity, the two accounts are complementary. The tale concludes with reference to applying the concept of personal identity for branching selves in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Application of the concept of personal identity in an MWI context implies that there is a bad end in store for us all, as David Lewis argued in his last essay.
80. Philo: Volume > 11 > Issue: 2
Franklin Mason

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Not all beings matter from the moral point of view. But how are we to distinguish those that do from those that do not? Some argue that mere sentience alone makes a being matter morally. Others argue that an ability to set ends and thus to place value on those ends is necessary for moral value. I break from these views and argue for a radically more inclusive account of the source of moral value. What makes a being matter morally is that it has a good of its own.