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  1. On the Incoherence of Agnosticism.Mike Almeida - manuscript
    Most theists do not put a (subjective) probability of 1 (certainty) on God's existence. Most atheists do not put a probability of 0 on God's existence. I argue that these familiar positions are incoherent. On the assumption of S5 and the probability calculus it can be shown that the only coherent (subjective) probabilities an agent can assign to God's existence/non-existence are 0 or 1. Believers must be completely committed believers and non-believers must be completely committed non-believers. Agnosticism is not a (...)
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  2. Personal or Non-Personal Divinity: A New Pluralist Approach.Julian Perlmutter - manuscript
    Religious disagreement – the existence of inconsistent religious views – is familiar and widespread. Among the most fundamental issues of such disagreement is whether to characterise the divine as personal or non-personal. On most other religious issues, the diverse views seem to presuppose some view on the personal/non-personal issue. In this essay, I address a particular question arising from disagreement over this issue. Let an exclusivist belief be a belief that a doctrine d on an issue is true, and that (...)
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  3. If We Can’t Tell What Theism Predicts, We Can’t Tell Whether God Exists: Skeptical Theism and Bayesian Arguments from Evil.Nevin Climenhaga - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion.
    According to a simple Bayesian argument from evil, the evil we observe is less likely given theism than given atheism, and therefore lowers the probability of theism. I consider the most common skeptical theist response to this argument, according to which our cognitive limitations make the probability of evil given theism inscrutable. I argue that if skeptical theists are right about this, then the probability of theism given evil is itself largely inscrutable, and that if this is so, we ought (...)
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  4. Suspension of judgment, non-additivity, and additivity of possibilities.Aldo Filomeno - forthcoming - Acta Analytica.
    In situations where we ignore everything but the space of possibilities, we ought to suspend judgment—that is, remain agnostic—about which of these possibilities is the case. This means that we cannot sum our degrees of belief in different possibilities, something that has been formalized as an axiom of non-additivity. Consistent with this way of representing our ignorance, I defend a doxastic norm that recommends that we should nevertheless follow a certain additivity of possibilities: even if we cannot sum degrees of (...)
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  5. The Propagation of Suspension of judgment. Or, should we confer any weight to crucial objections the truth-value of which we are ignorant?Aldo Filomeno - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-22.
    It is not uncommon in the history of science and philosophy to encounter crucial experiments or crucial objections the truth-value of which we are ignorant, that is, about which we suspend judgment. Should we ignore such objections? Contrary to widespread practice, I show that in and only in some circumstances they should not be ignored, for the epistemically rational doxastic attitude is to suspend judgment also about the hypothesis that the objection targets. In other words, suspension of judgment "propagates" from (...)
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  6. Conventionalising rebirth: Buddhist agnosticism and the doctrine of two truths.Bronwyn Finnigan - forthcoming - In Yujin Nagasawa & Mohammad Saleh Zarepour (eds.), Global Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion: from Religious Experience to the Afterlife. Oxford University Press.
    What should the Buddhist attitude be to rebirth if it is believed to be inconsistent with current science? This chapter critically engages forms of Buddhist agnosticism that adopt a position of uncertainty about rebirth but nevertheless recommend ‘behaving as if’ it were true. What does it mean to behave as if rebirth were true, and are Buddhist agnostics justified in adopting this position? This chapter engages this question in dialogue with Mark Siderits’ reductionist analysis of the Buddhist doctrine of the (...)
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  7. Agnosticism.Graham Oppy - forthcoming - KİLİKYA JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY.
    I endorse the following claims in this paper. (1) Agnosticism is suspension of judgment on existence claims concerning gods and God. (2) Historical agnostics accepted (1) but unwisely insisted on further conditions best set aside. (3) Particular case agnosticism is less problematic than general principle-based agnosticism. (4) Agnostics should suspend judgment on—or, on occasion, reject—atomic claims of the form ‘God is F’.
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  8. The Varieties of Agnosticism.Filippo Ferrari & Luca Incurvati - 2022 - Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2):365-380.
    We provide a framework for understanding agnosticism. The framework accounts for the varieties of agnosticism while vindicating the unity of the phenomenon. This combination of unity and plurality is achieved by taking the varieties of agnosticism to be represented by several agnostic stances, all of which share a common core provided by what we call the minimal agnostic attitude. We illustrate the fruitfulness of the framework by showing how it can be applied to several philosophical debates. In particular, several philosophical (...)
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  9. Rejection, denial and the democratic primaries.Luca Incurvati - 2022 - Think 21 (61):105-109.
    Starting from the case of insurance claims, I investigate the dynamics of acceptance, rejection and denial. I show that disagreement can be more varied than one might think. I illustrate this by looking at the Warren/Sanders controversy in the 2020 democratic primaries and at religious agnosticism.
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  10. Buddhismo e senso comune. Filosofia della meditazione.Marco Simionato - 2022 - Padova PD, Italia: Padova University Press.
    In che cosa crede chi pratica la meditazione buddhista? Dare una risposta univoca e coerente è assai difficile; il Buddhismo infatti si concretizza in una molteplicità di scuole e dottrine caratterizzate da complesse logiche e metafisiche. Ci sono tuttavia delle indicazioni minimali che fungono da denominator comune per chi si accosta alla meditazione. Esse riguardano soprattutto l’assenza di punti di vista determinati, l’esperienza del tempo e la relazione di dipendenza reciproca di ogni cosa con ogni altra. Utilizzando gli strumenti della (...)
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  11. Sañjaya’s Ajñānavāda and Mahāvīra’s Anekāntavāda: From Agnosticism to Pluralism.Anish Chakravarty - 2021 - In Krishna Mani Pathak (ed.), Quietism, Agnosticism and Mysticism Mapping the Philosophical Discourse of the East and the West. Singapore: Springer, Singapore. pp. 93-108.
    This chapter aims to examine parallels between two ancient Indian philosophical schools, Jaina (Jainism) of Mahāvīra and Ajñāna (Unending Agnosticism) of Sañjaya Belaṭṭhiputta. Jaina and Ajñāna traditions were a part of the Non-Vedic larger Śramaṇa movement of seventh to sixth-century BCE India, where Śramaṇa were monastics, who dwelled in forests and lived a retired life, focussing themselves in the search of discovering the knowledge of truth, reality and existence. Sañjaya and Mahāvīra were contemporaries and were a prominent and well-known Śramaṇa (...)
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  12. Is agnosticism liveable?Edgar Danielyan - 2021 - Academia Letters (June 2021).
    In 'Weak agnosticism defended' Graham Oppy set out to ’show that agnosticism can be so formulated that it is no less philosophically respectable than theism and atheism’. Oppy begins by differentiating between strong agnosticism, which obliges rational persons to suspend judgment on the question of God’s existence, and weak agnosticism, which allows rational persons to do so. Weak agnosticism is thus the philosophical position that it is possible and rational - but not obligatory - to suspend judgment on the question (...)
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  13. Friedman on suspended judgment.Michal Masny - 2020 - Synthese 197 (11):5009-5026.
    In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order attitude, with a question as its content. In this paper, I offer a critique of Friedman’s project. I begin by responding to her arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of suspended judgment, and thus undercut the negative case for her own view. Further, I raise worries about the details of her positive account, and in particular about her claim that one suspends judgment about (...)
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  14. Does The Universe Have A Cause?Graham Oppy - 2020 - In Michael Peterson & Robert Van Arragon (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1-26.
    In this paper, I set out a fairly careful argument for the claim that natural reality ("the universe') does not have--and could not have--a cause. I being with a discussion of the question whether causal reality could have a cause. I claim that it is obvious that causal reality cannot have a cause. I then turn to a discussion of natural reality. I contend that, necessarily, natural reality exhausts causal reality: necessarily, natural reality and causal reality are one and the (...)
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  15. Review of: Graham Oppy. 2018. Atheism and Agnosticism. Cambridge University Press. [REVIEW]Dan Baras - 2019 - Reading Religion 1:1.
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  16. Introduction to Companion to Atheism and Philosophy.Graham Oppy - 2019 - In A Companion to Atheism and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 1-11.
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  17. Religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue.Manas Kumar Sahu - 2019 - IOSR 24 (7):57-62.
    Religious exclusivism is the biggest threat for multi-religious society at the same time, ambivalent thoughts among religion in religious pluralism due to religious diversity often yields religious violence. In both of the extreme, (religious exclusivism and religious pluralism) there is the possibility of religious violence, i.e., religious riots, terrorism, mob lynching, and communalism. The objective of this paper is to discuss the significance of interreligious dialogue (IRD), its basic principle, how IRD will help us for addressing the problems of humanity (...)
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  18. Epistemic Vices in Public Debate: The Case of New Atheism.Ian James Kidd - 2017 - In Christopher Cotter & Philip Quadrio (eds.), New Atheism's Legacy: Critical Perspectives from Philosophy and the Social Sciences. Springer. pp. 51-68..
    Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism is intrinsically (...)
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  19. Rationality and Worldview.Graham Oppy - 2017 - In Paul Draper & J. L. Schellenberg (eds.), Renewing Philosophy of Religion: Exploratory Essays. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 174-86.
    In this paper, I aim to bring out the implausibility of the claim that there is a class of philosophers of religion—holders of a particular constellation of beliefs about religion—whose religious beliefs are either uniquely rational or uniquely supported by a stock of cogent arguments. My initial focus will be on models of parties to religious disagreements. These models may be simple, but I believe that there is much to be learned from them.
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  20. The critique of religion as political critique: Mīrzā Fatḥ ʿAlī Ākhūndzāda's pre-Islamic xenology.Rebecca Gould - 2016 - Intellectual History Review 26 (2):171-184.
    (Awarded the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize) Mīrzā Fatḥ 'Alī Ākhūndzāda’s Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865) is often read as a Persian attempt to introduce European Enlightenment political thought to modern Iranian society. This essay frames Ākhūndzāda’s text within a broader intellectual tradition. I read Ākhūndzāda as a radical reformer whose intellectual ambition were shaped by prior Persian and Arabic endeavors to map the diversity of religious belief and to critically assess (...)
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  21. Desiring the Hidden God: Knowledge Without Belief.Julian Perlmutter - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4):51--64.
    For many people, the phenomenon of divine hiddenness is so total that it is far from clear to them that God exists at all. Reasonably enough, they therefore do not believe that God exists. Yet it is possible, whilst lacking belief in God’s reality, nonetheless to see it as a possibility that is both realistic and attractive; and in this situation, one will likely want to be open to the considerable benefits that would be available if God were real. In (...)
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  22. Hume's Philosophy of Irreligion and the Myth of British Empiricism.Paul Russell - 2012 - In Alan Bailey & Dan O'Brien (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume. Continuum. pp. 377-395.
    This chapter outlines an alternative interpretation of Hume’s philosophy, one that aims, among other things, to explain some of the most perplexing puzzles concerning the relationship between Hume’s skepticism and his naturalism. The key to solving these puzzles, it is argued, rests with recognizing Hume’s fundamental irreligious aims and objectives, beginning with his first and greatest work, A Treatise of Human Nature. The irreligious interpretation not only reconfigures our understanding of the unity and structure of Hume’s thought, it also provides (...)
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  23. Dudgeon, William (1705/6–1743), freethinker and philosopher.Paul Russell - 2004 - In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford Univerrsity Press.
    Dudgeon, William (1705/6–1743), freethinker and philosopher, is of unknown origins. A tenant farmer who resided at Lennel Hill Farm, near Coldstream, Berwickshire, he was one of several philosophers active in the borders area of Scotland during this period. Other figures in this group include Andrew Baxter, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and most importantly David Hume.....
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  24. Weak agnosticism defended.Graham Oppy - 1994 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36 (3):147 - 167.
    Agnosticism has had some bad press in recent years. Nonetheless, I hope to show that agnosticism can be so formulated that it is no less philosophically respectable than theism and atheism. This is not a mere philosophical exercise; for, as it happens, the formulated position is--I think--the one to which I subscribe. I include a qualification here since it may be that the position to which I subscribe is better characterised as fallibilist atheism--but more of that anon.
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  25. Atheism, agnosticism, noncognitivism (1998).Theodore M. Drange - manuscript
    This online essay puts forth and defends precise definitions of the terms "atheism," "agnosticism." and "[theological] noncognitivism.".
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