Despite overlooking religious topics, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI) has had a large impact in philosophy of religion. This article surveys that influence and the reasons for it. In what follows, I first describe the reception of certain key concepts from the PI in philosophy of religion. Second, I examine a few scattered remarks on religious topics in the PI. Third, I consider the relevance of the PI for contemporary philosophy of religion. I argue that the dialogical nature of the PI, (...) allowing different generations of readers to engage it with their particular philosophical problems, is key to its longterm influence. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that internalistic foundationalist theories of the justification of memory belief are inadequate. Taking a discussion of John Pollock as a starting point, I argue against any theory that requires a memory belief to be based on a phenomenal state in order to be justified. I then consider another version of internalistic foundationalism and claim that it, too, is open to important objections. Finally, I note that both varieties of foundationalism fail to account for the epistemic (...) status of our justified nonoccurrent beliefs, and hence are drastically incomplete. (shrink)

Despite the growth in research in philosophy of religion over the past several decades, recent years have seen a number of critical studies of this subfield in an effort to redirect the methods and topics of inquiry. This article argues that in addition to problems of religious parochialism described by critics such as Wesley Wildman, the subfield is facing a problem of relevance. In responding to this problem, it suggests that philosophers of religion should do three things: first, be critically (...) self-aware about their aims of inquiry; second, investigate concepts used by other philosophers, scientists, and religious studies scholars to identify and dispel confusion about religions; and third, following the model of applied ethics, work to clarify concepts and advance arguments of contemporary practical urgency. (shrink)

Philosophers and theologians acknowledge that "fideism" is difficult to define but rarely agree on what the best characterization of the term is. In this article, I investigate the history of use of "fideism" to explore why its meaning has been so contested and thus why it has not always been helpful for resolving philosophical problems. I trace the use of the term from its origins in French theology to its current uses in philosophy and theology, concluding that "fideism" is helpful (...) in resolving philosophical problems only when philosophers scrupulously acknowledge the tradition of use that informs their understanding of the word. (shrink)

In a pair of recent articles, Brian Leftow and Eleonore Stump offer independent, although similar, accounts of the metaphysics of the Incarnation. Both believe that their Aquinas-inspired theories can offer solutions to the kind of Leibniz’s Law problems that can seem to threaten the logical possibility of this traditional Christian doctrine. In this paper, I’ll have a look at their compositional account of the nature of God incarnate. In the end, I believe their position can be seen to have unacceptable (...) philosophical and theological implications, and that is it inadequate to solve the Leibniz’s law problems that motivate it in the first place. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to explain how Wittgenstein's philosophy may be helpful for understanding and addressing challenges to cross-cultural communication in educational contexts. In particular, the notions of “hinge,” “intellectual distance,” and “grounds” from On Certainty will be helpful for identifying cultural differences. Wittgenstein's dialogical conception of philosophy in Philosophical Investigations will be helpful for addressing that cultural difference in conversation. While here can be no panacea to address all potential sources of confusion, Wittgenstein's philosophy has strong resources (...) that are helpful for curbing some of our human tendencies to misunderstand other people. (shrink)

Traditionally, the term ’God’ has been understood either as a proper name or as a description. However, according to a new view, the term God’ in a sentence like "Jesus Christ is God" functions as a kind term, much as the term ’tiger’ functions in the sentence "Tigger is a tiger." In this paper I examine the claim that divinity can be construed as a ’supernatural’ kind, developing the outlines of an account of the semantics of God’ along these lines, (...) and suggest that it might solve an important philosophical problem concerning the Incarnation. (shrink)

According to Eric Funkhouser, omnipotence and necessary moral perfection (what Funkhouser calls "impeccability") are not compatible. Funkhouser gives two arguments for this claim. In this paper, I argue that neither of Funkhouser's arguments is sound. The traditional theist can reasonably claim that, contra Funkhouser, (i) there is no possible being who possesses all of God's attributes sans impeccability, and (ii) the fact that there are things that God cannot do does not entail that God lacks omnipotence. Armed with (i) and (...) (ii), the theist has all that is needed to refute Funkhouser's arguments. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of studies of the history of the term “religion” and how it figures in conceptions of “the secular” and of cultural differences generally. A recurrent theme in these studies is that “religion” carries associations with Protestant Christianity and thus is not as universal a category as it might appear. The aim of this paper is to explore some resources in Wittgenstein’s philosophy to obtain greater clarity about the contexts of ascription of religion-status to (...) various phenomena and thus to gain perspective on claims made by scholars who investigate the genealogy of the term. While there is good reason to be circumspect about uncritical use of the term “religion” (no less in philosophizing about religions or conducting interreligious dialogue), I argue that instead of abandoning the term or proffering a critical theory of religion, investigation of ascriptions of religion will help philosophers to perceive more clearly the social dynamics that have led to some- one or thing being called religious and thus avoid equivocations that could obstruct the ends of philosophical inquiry or dialogue. (shrink)

When surveying the scholarly literature over Wittgensteinian fideism, it is easy to get the sense that the principal interlocutors, Kai Nielsen and D.Z. Phillips, talk past one another, but finding the right words for appraising the distance between the two voices is difficult. In this paper, I seek to appreciate this intellectual distance through an exploration of the varying philosophical aims of Nielsen and Phillips, of the different intellectual imperatives that guide their respective conceptions of philosophical practice. In so doing, (...) I seek to show how a contemplative mode in philosophy may be used to appraise a philosophical dispute and the terms of disagreement. In this case, a contemplative approach to understanding the dispute would frame Nielsen’s and Phillips’ contributions against the backdrop of the ends they conceive philosophy to have. (shrink)

Timothy O’Connor’s book Theism and Ultimate Explanation offers a defense of a new version of the cosmological argument. In his discussion, O’Connor argues against the coherence of a brute fact “explanation” of the universe and for the claim that the God of theism cannot be logically contingent. In this paper, I take issue with both of these arguments. Regarding the former, I claim that contrary to what O’Connor asserts, we have no good reason to prefer an account according to which (...) the universe is explained via a necessary being to that of a naturalist who thinks that the universe is contingent and ultimately unexplained. Regarding the latter, I argue that the possibility of a logically contingent God is fully consistent with traditional theism. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have used expressions of Wittgenstein’s (e.g. “language-games,” “form of life,” and “family resemblance”) in attempts to conceive of the discipline of philosophy in a broad, open, and perhaps global way. These Wittgenstein-inspired approaches indicate an awareness of the importance of cultural and historical diversity for approaching philosophical questions. While some philosophers have taken inspiration from Wittgenstein in embracing contextualism in philosophical hermeneutics, Wittgenstein himself was more instrumental than contextual in his treatment of other philosophers; his focus (...) in his writings was on his own philosophical problems. Does this mean that Wittgensteinian philosophy is a poor resource after all for comparative, cross-cultural, or globally-engaged philosophy (i.e. if it is properly Wittgensteinian)? In this article, I examine the relevance of Wittgenstein to contextually-sensitive philosophy through studies of his conceptions of history and culture, his interest in Spengler’s philosophy of history, and recent scholarship by Hans-Johann Glock and Hans Sluga on the place of contextualism in Wittgenstein’s analysis of philosophical problems. Ultimately, this article advances the view that there are strong resources in Wittgenstein’s philosophy for those seeking a more globally-engaged approach to the field. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, language is part of a social activity in both Wittgenstein and Xunzi 荀子, and for both clarification of language is central to their philosophical projects; the goal of this article is to explore the extent of resonance and discord that may be found when comparing these two philosophers. While for Xunzi, the rectification of names (zhengming 正名) is anchored in a regard for establishing, propagating, and/or restoring a harmonious social system, perspicuity is for Wittgenstein represented as a philosophical (...) end in itself. The article ventures study in particular the themes of perspicuity and aspect-perception in Wittgenstein together with the topics of correcting names and the cultivation of the heart-mind (xin 心) in the Xunzi. The aspiration of this project is to gain an overview of the role(s) of clarification projects in different philosophical traditions, all while not overlooking the different historical contexts and philosophical ends of these two philosophers. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a version of the Total Evidence view according to which the rational response to disagreement depends upon one's total evidence. I argue that perceptual evidence of a certain kind is significantly weightier than many other types of evidence, including testimonial. Furthermore, what is generally called "The Uniqueness Thesis" is actually a conflation of two distinct principles that I dub "Evidential Uniqueness" and "Rationality Uniqueness." The former principle is likely true but the latter almost certainly (...) false. Seeing why the Rationality Uniqueness fails opens the door to seeing how mutual reasonable disagreement is possible even among those who share the same evidence. (shrink)

At first glance, it might seem an odd pairing: the Analects and Wittgenstein. Comparison between a classical Chinese philosophical text, whose primary topics were the cultivation of xiao and he, and the corpus of an early to mid-twentieth-century Austrian philosopher, whose primary topics had to do with logic, language, and the nature of philosophy, does not obviously recommend itself. Yet, I contend in this article that there is much to be gained from careful comparison between these two very different pictures (...) of philosophy, particularly where it comes to the practices of clarifying that which is confused or obscured. This study will aid primarily in developing Wittgensteinian... (shrink)

The New Demon World Objection claims that reliabilist accounts of justification are mistaken because there are justified empirical beliefs at demon worlds—worlds at which the subjects are systematically deceived by a Cartesian demon. In this paper, I defend strongly verific (but not necessarily reliabilist) accounts of justification by claiming that there are two ways to construct a theory of justification: by analyzing our ordinary concept of justification or by taking justification to be a theoretic term defined by its role in (...) the theory of knowledge. The former route is not promising because of the splintered nature of our ordinary concept of justification—or perhaps because there is no single such concept. On the other hand, if justification is defined by the role it plays in the theory of knowledge, then there is good reason to think that justification must be strongly truth-conductive since the term was introduced by Edmund Gettier to play the primary role in converting true belief into knowledge. And if that is right, then there will be no justified empirical belief at demon worlds. The real lesson of the demon world is then turned on its head: justification does not supervene on what one shares with one’s deceived doppelganger. (shrink)

In this short piece, I respond to Brian R. Clack's review of my book, Wittgenstein within the Philosophy of Religion.

In the third chapter of his book Psychosemantics , Jerry A. Fodor argues that the truth of meaning holism (the thesis that the content of a psychological state is determined by the totality of that state's epistemic liaisons) would be fatal for intentionalistic psychology. This is because holism suggests that no two people are ever in the same intentional state, and so a psychological theory that generalizes over such states will be composed of generalizations which fail to generalize. Fodor then (...) sets out to show that there is no reason to believe in holism by arguing that its primary foundation (i.e. functional-role semantics), when properly understood (i.e. when construed as a two-factor theory of content), is demonstrably false. In this paper, I argue two claims. First, I try to show that Fodor has seriously misrepresented two-factor theories and that his arguments against his strawman do nothing to indicate the falsity of the genuine article. Second, I argue that if one accepts meaning holism in the form of a two-factor theory, there is no particular reason to think that one is hereby committed to the futility of intentionalistic psychology. In making this point, I make a brief excursion into the psychological literature during which I discuss the belief perseverance phenomenon, the encoding specificity hypothesis, and a problem in human deductive reasoning. My second argument leads to a discussion of how such a psychology could be developed even if no two people are ever in the same intentional state. (shrink)

This is a review of Mu Peng's recent book on popular religion in rural China.

This is a review of Miles Hollingworth's recent intellectual biography of Wittgenstein.

Review of A. W. Moore's 2003 book on Kant's moral and religious philosophy.

Subjects of Experience is as ambitious as it is contrary to the spirit of most of contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of mind. The reader needs a scorecard to keep track of all the currently unfashionable positions that Lowe adopts in this courageous little book. While the work ranges broadly over many topics, Lowe’s account of the self is at its core, and will be the focus of this review. However, it should be noted that one of the virtues of (...) Subjects of Experience is its broad perspective. In addition to the book’s central discussion of the self, there are chapters on mental causation, perception, action, self-knowledge, and language, thought and imagination. (shrink)

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that Socrates is a cognitivist about emotions, but then ask how the beliefs that constitute emotions can come into being, and why those beliefs seem more resistant to change through rational persuasion than other beliefs.

Kriegel described the problem of intentional inexistence as one of the ‘perennial problems of philosophy’, 307–340, 2007: 307). In the same paper, Kriegel alluded to a modal realist solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. However, Kriegel does not state by name who defends the kind of modal realist solution he has in mind. Kriegel also points out that even what he believes to be the strongest version of modal realism does not pass the ‘principle of representation’ and thus modal (...) realism is not an adequate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. In this paper, I respond to Kriegel by defending a modal realist solution that he did not consider in 2007, called ‘extended modal realism’. EMR is a version of modal realism where possible worlds are not completely isolated as they are under the Lewisian model. Rather, under EMR worlds are, in a way, spatiotemporally related. The fact EMR worlds are related allows EMR to sufficiently pass the principle of representation and thus can be deemed a legitimate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. I conclude that either EMR can pass the principle of representation in some cases or, and I think the more sensible option, we give up on the principle of representation altogether. (shrink)

This paper sets mathematics among the sciences, despite not being empirical, because it studies relations of various sorts, like the sciences. Each empirical science studies the relations among objects, which relations determining which science. The mathematical science studies relations as such, regardless of what those relations may be or be among, how relations themselves are related. This places it at the extreme among the sciences with no objects of its own (A Subject with no Object, by J.P. Burgess and G. (...) Rosen). Examples are discussed. The historical development of written mathematics from algorithms on clay tablets to theorems with proofs is said to show that application of algorithms to specific problems and theorems to scientific objects is like allegorical interpretation. Mathematics fits into the modern scientific context because the sciences, beginning with Galileo, have been constructed in imitation of mathematics. Viewing mathematics this way does not solve any ontological problems, but it does show how mathematics avoids them. Epistemological problems, insuperable for object realism, are simplified. For example, we have access to relations among any objects that we can consider objectively, first physical objects and then mathematical objects of greater and greater abstraction. (shrink)

Methadone maintenance therapy is a cost-effective, evidence-based treatment for heroin dependence. In the USA, a majority of heroin-dependent offenders are forced to detox from methadone when incarcerated. Recent research published in The Lancet has demonstrated the negative health and economic outcomes associated with such policies. Methadone Continuation Versus Forced Withdrawal on Incarceration in a Combined US Prison and Jail: A Randomised, Open Label Trial. The Lancet, 386, 350–359). This novel evidence raises questions as to the justification for current policies of (...) forced detox in American prisons. Opponents of methadone provision in prisons might offer arguments from retributivism, resource allocation and curative effectiveness to justify their position. This article contends that these arguments do not stand up to ethical scrutiny. In light of this, we hold that American policymakers should reform criminal justice policies to allow the initiation and continuation of methadone treatment in correctional settings. This would be consistent with both international recommendations and the example set by a number of other Western countries. (shrink)

In this chapter, we introduce the notion of “moral neuroenhancement,” offering a novel definition as well as spelling out three conditions under which we expect that such neuroenhancement would be most likely to be permissible (or even desirable). Furthermore, we draw a distinction between first-order moral capacities, which we suggest are less promising targets for neurointervention, and second-order moral capacities, which we suggest are more promising. We conclude by discussing concerns that moral neuroenhancement might restrict freedom or otherwise “misfire,” and (...) argue that these concerns are not as damning as they may seem at first. (shrink)

forall x: Calgary is a full-featured textbook on formal logic. It covers key notions of logic such as consequence and validity of arguments, the syntax of truth-functional propositional logic TFL and truth-table semantics, the syntax of first-order (predicate) logic FOL with identity (first-order interpretations), symbolizing English in TFL and FOL, and Fitch-style natural deduction proof systems for both TFL and FOL. It also deals with some advanced topics such as modal logic, soundness, and functional completeness. Exercises with solutions are available. (...) It is provided in PDF (for screen reading, printing, and a special version for dyslexics), HTML, and in LaTeX source code. (shrink)

Livro-texto de introdução à lógica, com (mais do que) pitadas de filosofia da lógica, produzido como uma versão revista e ampliada do livro Forallx: Calgary. Trata-se da versão de 13 de outubro de 2022. Comentários, críticas, correções e sugestões são muito bem-vindos.

La somme d’Humbrecht fait preuve d’une érudition peu commune et d’un réel amour de Thomas d’Aquin (mais au détriment d’Aristote, comme c’est de mode). Sa réflexion s’allonge au fil de la plume, en des méandres et des reflux quelquefois difficiles à suivre. Mais donne aussi le sentiment heureux d’une libre méditation de l’auteur voguant au gré de ses pensées, méditation à laquelle il nous invite avec amitié, pourvu que nous acceptions de nous laisser guider. Hélas, si nous branchons un (...) GPS, nous réalisons que nous nous promenons benoîtement au milieu de sables mouvants prêts à nous engloutir tout entiers à chaque pas. (shrink)