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  1. (5 other versions)Philosophical Explanations. [REVIEW]Robert Nozick - 1981 - Ethics 94 (2):326-327.
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  • (3 other versions)Practical Ethics.Peter Singer - 1979 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Susan J. Armstrong & Richard George Botzler.
    For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? Am (...)
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  • Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science.Elliott Sober - 2008 - Cambridge University Press.
    How should the concept of evidence be understood? And how does the concept of evidence apply to the controversy about creationism as well as to work in evolutionary biology about natural selection and common ancestry? In this rich and wide-ranging book, Elliott Sober investigates general questions about probability and evidence and shows how the answers he develops to those questions apply to the specifics of evolutionary biology. Drawing on a set of fascinating examples, he analyzes whether claims about intelligent design (...)
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  • On Determining How Important It Is Whether or Not There Is a God.T. J. Mawson - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (4):95--105.
    Can the issue of how important it is whether or not there is a God be decided prior to deciding whether or not there is a God? In this paper, I explore some difficulties that stand in the way of answering this question in the affirmative and some of the implications of these difficulties for that part of the Philosophy of Religion which concerns itself with assessing arguments for and against the existence of God, the implications for how its importance (...)
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  • What does Death have to do with the Meaning of Life?: MICHAEL P. LEVINE.Michael P. Levine - 1987 - Religious Studies 23 (4):457-465.
    Philosophers often distinguish in some way between two senses of life's meaning. Paul Edwards terms these a ‘cosmic’ and ‘terrestrial’ sense. The cosmic sense is that of an overall purpose of which our lives are a part and in terms of which our lives must be understood and our purposes and interests arranged. This overall purpose is often identified with God's divine scheme, but the two need not necessarily be equated. The terrestrial sense of meaning is the meaning people find (...)
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  • The Myth of Sisyphus.Albert Camus - 1957 - Philosophical Review 66 (1):104-107.
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  • (1 other version)19 The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.William Rowe - 1999 - In Eleonore Stump & Michael J. Murray (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 6--157.
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  • The Father of Lies?Hud Hudson - 2014 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 5:147-166.
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  • God and the ontological foundation of morality.Wes Morriston - 2012 - Religious Studies 48 (1):15 - 34.
    In recent years, William Lane Craig has vigorously championed a moral argument for God's existence. The backbone of Craig's argument is the claim that only God can provide a ' sound foundation in reality' for morality. The present article has three principal aims. The first is to interpret and clarify the account of the ontological foundation of morality proposed by Craig. The second is to press home an important objection to that account. The third is to expose the weakness of (...)
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  • Our Cosmic Insignificance.Guy Kahane - 2013 - Noûs 47 (2):745-772.
    The universe that surrounds us is vast, and we are so very small. When we reflect on the vastness of the universe, our humdrum cosmic location, and the inevitable future demise of humanity, our lives can seem utterly insignificant. Many philosophers assume that such worries about our significance reflect a banal metaethical confusion. They dismiss the very idea of cosmic significance. This, I argue, is a mistake. Worries about cosmic insignificance do not express metaethical worries about objectivity or nihilism, and (...)
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  • Is the Existence of God Relevant to the Meaning of Life?Jeffrey Gordon - 1983 - Modern Schoolman 60 (4):227-246.
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  • Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study.Thaddeus Metz - 2013 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    What makes a person's life meaningful? Thaddeus Metz offers a new answer to an ancient question which has recently returned to the philosophical agenda. He proceeds by examining what, if anything, all the conditions that make a life meaningful have in common. The outcome of this process is a philosophical theory of meaning in life. He starts by evaluating existing theories in terms of the classic triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful. He considers whether meaning in life (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism.William L. Rowe - 1979 - American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (4):335 - 341.
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  • The Necessity of Gratuitous Evil.William Hasker - 1992 - Faith and Philosophy 9 (1):23-44.
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  • Concepts of God.William Wainwright - unknown
    The object of attitudes valorized in the major religious traditions is typically regarded as maximally great. Conceptions of maximal greatness differ but theists believe that a maximally great reality must be a maximally great person or God. Theists largely agree that a maximally great person would be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and all good. They do not agree on a number of God's other attributes, however. We will illustrate this by examining the debate over God's impassibility in western theism and a (...)
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  • Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life.Susan Wolf - 1997 - Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1):207.
    The topic of self-interest raises large and intractable philosophical questions–most obviously, the question “In what does self-interest consist?” The concept, as opposed to the content of self-interest, however, seems clear enough. Self-interest is interest in one's own good. To act self-interestedly is to act on the motive of advancing one's own good. Whether what one does actually is in one's self-interest depends on whether it actually does advance, or at least, minimize the decline of, one's own good. Though it may (...)
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  • The problem of evil: skeptical theism leads to moral paralysis.Scott Sehon - 2010 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67 (2):67 - 80.
    Natural disasters would seem to constitute evidence against the existence of God, for, on the face of things, it is mysterious why a completely good and all-powerful God would allow the sort of suffering we see from earthquakes, diseases, and the like. The skeptical theist replies that we should not expect to be able to understand God's ways, and thus we should not regard it as surprising or mysterious that God would allow natural evil. I argue that skeptical theism leads (...)
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  • Should We Want God to Exist?Guy Kahane - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (3):674-696.
    Whether God exists is a metaphysical question. But there is also a neglected evaluative question about God’s existence: Should we want God to exist? Very many, including many atheists and agnostics, appear to think we should. Theists claim that if God didn’t exist things would be far worse, and many atheists agree; they regret God’s inexistence. Some remarks by Thomas Nagel suggest an opposing view: that we should want God not to exist. I call this view anti-theism. I explain how (...)
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  • Philosophical explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    Nozick analyzes fundamental issues, such as the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the foundations of ethics, and the meaning of life.
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  • Reason and value.E. J. Bond - 1983 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    The relations between reason, motivation and value present problems which, though ancient, remain intractable. If values are objective and rational how can they move us and if they are dependent on our contingent desires how can they be rational? E. J. Bond makes a bold attack on this dilemma. The widespread view among philosophers today is that judgements contain an irreducible element of personal commitment. To this Professor Bond proposes an account of values as objective and value judgements as true (...)
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  • The Humean obstacle to evidential arguments from suffering: On avoiding the evils of “appearance”.Stephen Wykstra - 1984 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (2):73 - 93.
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  • Divine hiddenness and the demographics of theism.Stephen Maitzen - 2006 - Religious Studies 42 (2):177-191.
    According to the much-discussed argument from divine hiddenness, God's existence is disconfirmed by the fact that not everyone believes in God. The argument has provoked an impressive range of theistic replies, but none has overcome the challenge posed by the unevendistribution of theistic belief around the world, a phenomenon for which naturalistic explanations seem more promising. The confound any explanation of why non-belief is always blameworthy or of why God allows blameless non-belief. They also cast doubt on the existence of (...)
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  • Is God an abstract object?Brian Leftow - 1990 - Noûs 24 (4):581-598.
    Before Duns Scotus, most philosophers agreed that God is identical with His necessary intrinsic attributes--omnipotence, omniscience, etc. This Identity Thesis was a component of widely held doctrines of divine simplicity, which stated that God exemplifies no metaphysical distinctions, including that between subject and attribute. The Identity Thesis seems to render God an attribute, an abstract object. This paper shows that the Identity Thesis follows from a basic theistic belief and does not render God abstract. If also discusses how one might (...)
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  • 8. The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil.Peter van Inwagen - 1988 - Philosophical Topics 16 (2):161-187.
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  • (1 other version)On the Meaning of Life.John Cottingham - 2002 - New York: Routledge.
    The question 'What is the meaning of life?' is one of the most fascinating, oldest and most difficult questions human beings have ever posed themselves. In an increasingly secularized culture, it remains a question to which we are ineluctably and powerfully drawn. Drawing skillfully on a wealth of thinkers, writers and scientists from Augustine, Descartes, Freud and Camus, to Spinoza, Pascal, Darwin, and Wittgenstein, _On the Meaning of Life_ breathes new vitality into one of the very biggest questions.
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  • Life, Meaning of.Thaddeus Metz - 2015 - In Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 1-6.
    This entry begins by indicating respects in which the concept of life’s meaning has only recently become salient in English-speaking bioethical discussions and by clarifying what talk of ‘life’s meaning’ and cognate phrases mean, at least to most of the philosophers and bioethicists who have used them. This essay then addresses six major respects in which thought about what makes a life meaningful has influenced bioethics. The first four issues concern life and death matters for human beings, and specifically involve: (...)
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  • The evidential argument from evil: A second look.William Rowe - 1996 - In Daniel Howard-Snyder (ed.), The Evidential Argument from Evil. Indiana University Press. pp. 262--85.
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  • What Euthyphro Should Have Said.William P. Alston - 2002 - In William Lane Craig (ed.), Philosophy of religion: a reader and guide. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. pp. 283-298.
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  • The Value Question in Metaphysics.Guy Kahane - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (1):27-55.
    Much seems to be at stake in metaphysical questions about, for example, God, free will or morality. One thing that could be at stake is the value of the universe we inhabit—how good or bad it is. We can think of competing philosophical positions as describing possibilities, ways the world might turn out to be, and to which value can be assigned. When, for example, people hope that God exists, or fear that we do not possess free will, they express (...)
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  • Evil and the theistic hypothesis: A response to Wykstra. [REVIEW]William L. Rowe - 1984 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (2):95 - 100.
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  • (1 other version)Reason and Value.E. J. Bond - 1983 - Philosophy 59 (229):411-413.
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  • Process Philosophy and the Question of Life's Meaning.Delwin Brown - 1971 - Religious Studies 7 (1):13 - 29.
    Recent discussions, principally among analytic philosophers, concerning the meaning and the validity of the ‘question of life's meaning’ are significant in several ways. They indicate how analytic philosophy, long charged with sterility, can clarify deeply human questions. They suggest useful avenues of discussion between the analysts and the existentialists, phenomenologists and process philosophers. And they offer some illuminating discriminations between theism and naturalism, and between religious and non-religious understandings of life. But an additional consequence of these discussions is the emergence (...)
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  • What Does Death Have to Do with the Meaning of Life?Michael P. Levine - 1987 - Religious Studies 23 (4):457 - 465.
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  • 6. Evil and Theodicy.William Rowe - 1988 - Philosophical Topics 16 (2):119-132.
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  • All too skeptical theism.William Hasker - 2010 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 68 (1-3):15-29.
    Skeptical theism contends that, due to our cognitive limitations, we cannot expect to be able to determine whether there are reasons which justify God’s permission of apparently unjustified evils. Because this is so, the existence of these evils does not constituted evidence against God’s existence. A common criticism is that the skeptical theist is implicitly committed to other, less palatable forms of skepticism, especially moral skepticism. I examine a recent defense against this charge mounted by Michael Bergmann. I point out (...)
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  • Psychosis and autism as diametrical disorders of the social brain.Bernard Crespi & Christopher Badcock - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (3):241-261.
    Autistic-spectrum conditions and psychotic-spectrum conditions (mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression) represent two major suites of disorders of human cognition, affect, and behavior that involve altered development and function of the social brain. We describe evidence that a large set of phenotypic traits exhibit diametrically opposite phenotypes in autistic-spectrum versus psychotic-spectrum conditions, with a focus on schizophrenia. This suite of traits is inter-correlated, in that autism involves a general pattern of constrained overgrowth, whereas schizophrenia involves undergrowth. These disorders also (...)
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  • Meaning in Life.Thaddeus Metz - 2017 - In Benjamin Matheson & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 353-370.
    This chapter critically explores contemporary philosophical understandings of whether meaning in life might depend on the presence or absence of an afterlife. After distinguishing various kinds of afterlife, it focuses most on the potential relevance of an eternal one, and considers at length the extreme but common views amongst philosophers that an eternal afterlife would be either necessary for a meaningful life or, conversely, sufficient for a meaningless one. It concludes by considering the plausibility of a more moderate view, that (...)
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  • The empirical argument from evil.William Rowe - 1986 - In Robert Audi & William J. Wainwright (eds.), Rationality, religious belief, and moral commitment: new essays in the philosophy of religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. pp. 227--247.
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  • The evolutionary social brain: From genes to psychiatric conditions.Bernard Crespi & Christopher Badcock - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (3):284-320.
    The commentaries on our target article, reflect the multidisciplinary yet highly fragmented state of current studies of human social cognition. Progress in our understanding of the human social brain must come from studies that integrate across diverse analytic levels, using conceptual frameworks grounded in evolutionary biology.
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  • Ruminations about evil.William L. Rowe - 1991 - Philosophical Perspectives 5:69-88.
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  • (5 other versions)Philosophical Explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Mind 93 (371):450-455.
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  • (5 other versions)Philosophical Explanations. [REVIEW]Robert Nozick - 1981 - Philosophy 58 (223):118-121.
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  • Human nature as God's purpose.Jacob Affolter - 2007 - Religious Studies 43 (4):443-455.
    This article responds to one of Thaddeus Metz's criticisms of the theory that the meaning of life is to fulfil a purpose assigned by God. In particular, it addresses the argument that only an atemporal God could ground meaning but that an atemporal God could not assign a purpose. In order to do this, the article first argues that Metz's criticisms misread the relevant sense of purpose. It then argues that on a more plausible reading of 'purpose', we can see (...)
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