Our paper presents a novel theory of weak crossover effects, based entirely on quantifier scope preferences and their consequences for variable binding. The structural notion of 'crossover' play no role. We develop a theory of scope preferences which ascribes a central role to the AGR-P System.

The critical examination of current hypotheses is one of the key ways in which scientific fields develop and grow. Therefore, any critique, including Haidle and Schlaudt’s article, “Where Does Cumulative Culture Begin? A Plea for a Sociologically Informed Perspective,” represents a welcome addition to the literature. However, critiques must also be evaluated. In their article, Haidle and Schlaudt review some approaches to culture and cumulative culture in both human and nonhuman primates. H&S discuss the “zone of latent solutions” hypothesis as (...) applied to nonhuman primates and stone-toolmaking premodern hominins. Here, we will evaluate whether H&S’s critique addresses its target. (shrink)

This is a 12-page article on the life and work in philosophy of religion by William P. Alston (1921-2009).

Is evil evidence against the existence of God? Even if God and evil are compatible, it remains hotly contested whether evil renders belief in God unreasonable. The Evidential Argument from Evil presents five classic statements on this issue by eminent philosophers and theologians and places them in dialogue with eleven original essays reflecting new thinking by these and other scholars. The volume focuses on two versions of the argument. The first affirms that there is no reason for God to permit (...) either certain specific horrors or the variety and profusion of undeserved suffering. The second asserts that pleasure and pain, given their biological role, are better explained by hypotheses other than theism. -/- Contributors include William P. Alston, Paul Draper, Richard M. Gale, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Alvin Plantinga, William L. Rowe, Bruce Russell, Eleonore Stump, Richard G. Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, and Stephen John Wykstra. (shrink)

This essay is a detailed study of William P. Alston’s view on the nature of Christian faith, which I assess in the context of three problems: the problem of the skeptical Christian, the problem of faith and reason, and the problem of the trajectory. Although Alston intended a view that would solve these problems, it does so only superficially. Fortunately, we can distinguish Alston’s view, on the one hand, from Alston’s illustrations of it, on the other hand. I argue (...) that, although Alston’s view only superficially solves these problems, Alston’s illustrations of it suggest a substantive way to solve them, a way that I sketch briefly. (shrink)

Reprinted in Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity, Oxford, 2009, eds Michael Rea and Thomas McCall. In this essay, I assess a certain version of ’social Trinitarianism’ put forward by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, ’trinity monotheism’. I first show how their response to a familiar anti-Trinitarian argument arguably implies polytheism. I then show how they invoke three tenets central to their trinity monotheism in order to avoid that implication. After displaying these tenets more fully, I (...) argue that Trinitarians would do well to hold Moreland’s and Craig’s trinity monotheism at arms length. (shrink)

This 9,000+ word entry briefly assesses five models of the Trinity, those espoused by (i) Richard Swinburne, (ii) William Lane Craig, (iii) Brian Leftow, (iv) Jeff Brower and Michael Rea, and (v) Peter van Inwagen.

A critique of Plantinga's free will defense. For an updated version of this critique, with a reply to objections from William Rowe and Alvin Plantinga, see my "The logical problem of evil: Plantinga and Mackie," in Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 19-33.

This is a reply to William Rowe, "The Problem of No Best World," Faith and Philosophy (1994).

We argue that Michael Peterson's and William Hasker's attempts to show that God and gratuitous evil are compatible constitute miserable failures. We then sketch Peter van Inwagen's attempt to do the same and conclude that, to date, no one has shown his attempt a failure.

This collection of essays is dedicated to William Rowe, with great affection, respect, and admiration. The philosophy of religion, once considered a deviation from an otherwise analytically rigorous discipline, has flourished over the past two decades. This collection of new essays by twelve distinguished philosophers of religion explores three broad themes: religious attitudes of faith, belief, acceptance, and love; human and divine freedom; and the rationality of religious belief. Contributors include: William Alston, Robert Audi, Jan Cover, Martin Curd, (...) Peter van Inwagen, Norman Kretzmann, George Nakhnikian, John Hawthorne, Philip Quinn, James Ross, Eleonore Stump, and William Wainwright. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia entry for William P. Alston.

This is a 4500 word critical review of Hasker's Oxford UP 2013 book.

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil (Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. In this article, we reply to Bill Rowe's "Evil is Evidence Against Theistic Belief" in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell 2003).

Among the things that students of the problem of evil think about is whether explanatory versions of the evidential argument from evil are better than others, better than William Rowe’s famous versions of the evidential argument, for example. Some of these students claim that the former are better than the latter in no small part because the former, unlike the latter, avoid the sorts of worries raised by so-called “skeptical theists”. Indeed, Trent Dougherty claims to have constructed an explanatory (...) version that is “fundamentally immune to considerations pertaining to skeptical theism”. I argue that he has done no such thing. (shrink)

Preprinted in God and the Problem of Evil(Blackwell 2001), ed. William Rowe. Many people deny that evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. After all, they say, the grounds for belief in God are much better than the evidence for atheism, including the evidence provided by evil. We will not join their ranks on this occasion. Rather, we wish to consider the proposition that, setting aside grounds for belief in God and relying only (...) on the background knowledge shared in common by nontheists and theists, evil makes belief in atheism more reasonable for us than belief in theism. Our aim is to argue against this proposition. We recognize that in doing so, we face a formidable challenge. It’s one thing to say that evil presents a reason for atheism that is, ultimately, overridden by arguments for theism. It’s another to say that it doesn’t so much as provide us with a reason for atheism in the first place. In order to make this latter claim seem initially more plausible, consider the apparent design of the mammalian eye or the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to support life. These are often proposed as reasons to believe in theism. Critics commonly argue not merely that these supposed reasons for theism are overridden by arguments for atheism but rather that they aren’t good reasons for theism in the first place. Our parallel proposal with respect to evil and atheism is, initially at least, no less plausible than this proposal with respect to apparent design and theism. (shrink)

This article assesses Bill Rowe's 1979 version of the evidential argument from evil.

The Victorian period in Britain was an “age of reform.” It is therefore not surprising that two of the era’s most eminent intellects described themselves as reformers. Both William Whewell and John Stuart Mill believed that by reforming philosophy—including the philosophy of science—they could effect social and political change. But their divergent visions of this societal transformation led to a sustained and spirited controversy that covered morality, politics, science, and economics. Situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian (...) society and its concerns, _Reforming Philosophy_ shows how two very different men captured the intellectual spirit of the day and engaged the attention of other scientists and philosophers, including the young Charles Darwin. Mill—philosopher, political economist, and Parliamentarian—remains a canonical author of Anglo-American philosophy, while Whewell—Anglican cleric, scientist, and educator—is now often overlooked, though in his day he was renowned as an authority on science. Placing their teachings in their proper intellectual, cultural, and argumentative spheres, Laura Snyder revises the standard views of these two important Victorian figures, showing that both men’s concerns remain relevant today. A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, _Reforming Philosophy_ is the first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety. A rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain, it will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy. (shrink)

A philosophically and historically sensitive account of the engagement of the major protagonists of Victorian British philosophy, Reforming Philosophy considers the controversies between William Whewell and John Stuart Mill on the topics of science, morality, politics, and economics. By situating their debate within the larger context of Victorian society and its concerns, Laura Snyder shows how two very different men—Whewell, an educator, Anglican priest, and critic of science; and Mill, a philosopher, political economist, and parliamentarian—reacted to the challenges (...) of their times, each seeking to reform science as a means of reforming society as a whole. The first book-length examination of the dispute between Mill and Whewell in its entirety, Reforming Philosophy provides a rich and nuanced understanding of the intellectual spirit of Victorian Britain and will be welcomed by philosophers and historians of science, scholars of Victorian studies, and students of the history of philosophy and political economy. (shrink)

This article examines the nineteenth-century debate about scientific method between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell. Contrary to standard interpretations (given, for example, by Achinstein, Buchdahl, Butts, and Laudan), I argue that their debate was not over whether to endorse an inductive methodology but rather over the nature of inductive reasoning in science and the types of conclusions yielded by it. Whewell endorses, while Mill rejects, a type of inductive reasoning in which inference is employed to find a property (...) or cause shared by the observed members of a class, which is generalized to all its members, including the unobserved ones. Because of this, Whewell’s inductivism, unlike Mill’s, is able to yield theoretical hypotheses referring to unob-servables such as molecules and light waves. This is contrary to the claims of some critics of inductivism who argue that inductivism is unable to yield such hypotheses. Moreover, I suggest that Whewell’s view of induction conforms more closely than Mill’s view to the practice of scientists such as Kepler, Newton, and Fresnel, who do attempt to discover laws involving unobservables. (shrink)

In this paper I demonstrate that, contrary to the standard interpretations, William Whewell's view of scientific method is neither that of the hypothetico-deductivist nor that of the retroductivist. Rather, he offers a unique inductive methodology, which he calls "discoverers' induction." After explicating this methodology, I show that Kepler's discovery of his first law of planetary motion conforms to it, as Whewell claims it does. In explaining Whewell's famous phrase about "happy guesses" in science, I suggest that Whewell intended a (...) distinction between "inductions," which can be empirically verified, and "mere hypotheses"--or guesses--which cannot. Finally, I argue that Whewell's discoverers' induction is a view worthy of our attention today, because it avoids a number of problems faced by prominent alternative methodologies. (shrink)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the opinion of science, as well as of philosophy and even religion, was, at least in Britain, firmly in the camp of the plurality of worlds, the view that intelligent life exists on other celestial bodies. William Whewell, considered an expert on science, philosophy and religion, would have been expected to support this position. Yet he surprised everyone in 1853 by publishing a work arguing strongly against the plurality view. This was even (...) stranger given that he had endorsed pluralism twenty years earlier in his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises. In this paper I show that the shift in Whewell’s view was motivated by three factors: the influence of Richard Owen’s theory of archetypes on Whewell’s view of the argument from design, and Whewell’s perception of the need to strengthen such arguments in light of evolutionary accounts of human origins; important developments in his view of philosophy and his role as a scientific expert; and new findings in astronomy. An examination of the development of Whewell’s position provides a lens through which we can view the interplay of theology, philosophy and science in the plurality of worlds debate.Keywords: William Whewell; Plurality of worlds; Natural theology; Analogies; Archetypes; Conjectures; Evolution. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, William Whewell claimed that his confirmation criterion of consilience was a truth-guarantor: we could, he believed, be certain that a consilient theory was true. Since that time Whewell has been much ridiculed for this claim by critics such as J. S. Mill and Bas van Fraassen. I have argued elsewhere that, while Whewell's claim that consilience can guarantee the truth of a theory is clearly wrong, consilience is indeed quite useful as a confirmation criterion ( (...) class='Hi'>Snyder 2005). Here I will show that, even when consilience gives evidence for a theory that turns out to be false, there is an important sense in which consilience shows that the theory has captured something correct about the natural-kind structure of the physical world. Whewell was therefore correct to claim that consilience provides a "criterion of reality" (Whewell [1847] 1967, vol. 2, 68). Consilience provides this by giving justification for the claim that we have really `cut nature at its causal joints', to adapt Plato's famous phrase. Because of this, consilience can play a role in an argument for scientific realism. (shrink)

What is the relation between science and philosophy of science? Specifically, does it matter whether a philosopher of science knows much about science or is actually engaged in scientific research? William Whewell is an obvious person to consider in relation to this question. Whewell was actively engaged in science in several important ways, some of which have not been previously noted. He conducted research in a number of scientific fields, he devised new terminology for the new discoveries made by (...) other scientists, and he frequently attempted to guide the experimental work of other scientists. Moreover, he was a philosopher of science who explicitly claimed to be inferring his methodological injunctions from an extensive study of the history of scientific work . My recent study of his unpublished letters and notebooks indicates that the intimate relation between science and philosophy was always foremost in Whewell’s mind; it was not a theoretical stance adopted after his philosophy was well-developed, as some have suggested. In this paper I will present an examination of the relation between Whewell’s involvement in science and the writing of his philosophy of science as a springboard to consider the more general question . Further insight into the relation between science and philosophy of science will be gained by contrasting Whewell’s strong involvement in science with the lack of such involvement in the case of his philosophical antagonist, J.S. Mill. (shrink)

It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of critical literature about Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas fails to link knowledge to understanding—fails to relate the encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of (...) the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about clothing, and shoes , and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita .This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting’s details is not altogether beside the point; some of this information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting, might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics called it “photographic” in its naturalism , in the profusion of its detail, and in the alleged “snapshot” quality of its composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility. Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth-century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in terms of what is apparent in it. 1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and His Times , p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted in ibid. Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” written with Neil Walsh Allen , “Picturing Vision” , and “Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” written with Ted Cohen. (shrink)

Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories. Timothy H. O'Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photographers who joined expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, opened the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Highlighting a recent Smart Museum of Art acquisition, One/Many brings together an exquisite group of photographs by Bell and O'Sullivan. Particularly noteworthy are their photographic panoramas, assemblages of individual (...) images joined together to form a continuous, horizontal landscape view. These panoramas have not been exhibited in well over a century and have never before been published. For the first time, One/Many investigates their role and purpose both within and outside of the surveys, taking into account the larger context of nineteenth-century modes of viewing. The volume also allows the little-known Bell's work to be better understood next to that of his more famous colleague. (shrink)

_Go beyond the cape and into the mind of the Man of Steel, in time for release of Zack Snyder's _Man of Steel_ movie and Superman's 75th anniversary_ He has thrilled millions for 75 years, with a legacy that transcends national, cultural, and generational borders, but is there more to the Man of Steel than just your average mythic superhero in a cape? The 20 chapters in this book present a fascinating exploration of some of the deeper philosophical questions (...) raised by Superman, the Last Son of Krypton and the newest hero in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture arsenal. (shrink)

New technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation, are currently touted as, not only giving us a better picture of the structure of the brain, but also a better understanding of our thinking. As Alan Snyder demonstrates when he claims his aim is to understand the ‘architecture of thought’ by investigating the brain. Against this backdrop, I will argue that new technologies present a worrying extension of mathematical natural science into the domain of human affairs. (...) Extrapolating upon Heidegger, I will put forward that neuroscientific experiments force thinking to conform to the mathematical conception of nature, rather than reveal something about the ‘true’ nature of our thinking. In a time when the expansion of mathematical natural science threatens to reduce every domain to that which is quantifiable, I will conclude by suggesting that the responsibility of the philosopher is to question the presuppositions of modern science and psychology.Nuevas tecnologías como la imagen de resonancia magnética funcional y la estimulación magnética transcranial se consideran presumiblemente capaces de darnos no solo una mejor imagen de nuestro cerebro, sino también una mejor comprensión de nuestro pensamiento, tal como demuestra Alan Snyder cuando afirma que su objetivo es entender la “arquitectura del pensamiento” mediante la investigación del cerebro. Contra este marco general, argumentaré que las nuevas tecnologías nos presentan una preocupante extensión de la ciencia natural matemática al dominio de los asuntos humanos. Extrapolando a partir de Heidegger, propondré que los experimentos neurocientíficos fuerzan al pensamiento a conformarse a la concepción matemática de la naturaleza en vez de revelar algo sobre la verdadera naturaleza de nuestro pensamiento. Nos encontramos en un momento en que o la expansión de la ciencia natural matemática amenaza con reducir todos los dominios a lo que es cuantificable. Concluiré sugiriendo que la responsabilidad del filósofo es cuestionar los presupuestos de la ciencia moderna y de la psicología. (shrink)

On November 15th, one week after the results of the 2016 US presidential election were known to all, Timothy Snyder, a distinguished historian of Modern Europe, took to his Facebook page where he formulated a series of steps he urged readers to take in response to what he clearly deemed an emerging threat to the future of American democracy. Snyder's message, which captured the sense of urgency and foreboding that was palpable across large swaths of the land, instantly (...) went viral. In a preface to comments informed by deep knowledge of the totalitarian regimes that held Europe in their grip in the decades following World War I, Snyder wrote: Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to... (shrink)

William Rowe’s a posteriori arguments for the non-existence of God are well-known. Rather less attention has been given, however, to Rowe’s intriguing a priori argument for atheism. In this paper, I examine the three published responses to Rowe’s a priori argument (due to Bruce Langtry, William Morris, and Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, respectively). I conclude that none is decisive, but I show that Rowe’s argument nevertheless requires more defence than he provides.

There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Nevertheless, some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is more “legitmate” in virtue of being “more basic” or “more fundamental”. This paper addresses two related issues. First, (...) we review some of these non-egalitarian arguments, lay out a laundry list of different, legitimate, notions of relative priority, and suggest that these arguments plausibly employ different such notions. Secondly, we argue that given a metaphysical-cum-epistemological gloss suggested by Frege’s foundationalist epistomology, the ordinals are plausibly more basic than the cardinals. This is just one orientation to relative priority one could take, however. Ultimately, we subscribe to an egalitarian attitude towards these formal characterizations: they are, in some sense, equally “legitimate”. (shrink)

Faith in God conflicts with reason—or so we’re told. We focus on two arguments for this conclusion. After evaluating three criticisms of them, we identify an assumption they share, namely that faith in God requires belief that God exists. Whether the assumption is true depends on what faith is. We sketch a theory of faith that allows for both faith in God without belief that God exists, and faith in God while in belief-cancelling doubt God’s existence. We then argue that (...) our theory, unlike the theory of Thomas Aquinas, makes sense of four central items of faith-data: (i) pístis in the Synoptics, (ii) ʾemunāh in the Hebrew scriptures, (iii) exemplars of faith in God, including Abraham, Jesus, and Mother Teresa, and (iv) the widespread experience of people of faith today. We close by assessing revisions of the two arguments we began with, revisions that align with our theory of faith, and find them dubious, at best. (shrink)

The 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill is widely regarded as one of history’s leading proponents of inductive science and of political liberty. Yet, oddly, philosophers working in his train have been remarkably unsuccessful in saying exactly what is wrong with the scientific skepticism or the political tyrannies of the past one hundred and fifty years. Is it possible that Mr. Mill was not such a good guy after all? … I recommend the book to anyone interested in a scholarly treatment (...) of Victorian England, of 19th-century science, of the history of scientific method, of the philosophy of induction, or of the underappreciated historian and philosopher William Whewell. For anyone who thinks John Stuart Mill was a champion of commonsense realism, inductive science, or individual liberty, the book is a must-read. (shrink)

مداخلة مترجمة عن الفرنسية للفيلسوف الفرنسي جيل دولوز.

For many people the existence of God is by no means a sufficiently clear feature of reality. This problem, the fact of divine hiddenness, has been a source of existential concern and has sometimes been taken as a rationale for support of atheism or agnosticism. In this collection of essays, a distinguished group of philosophers of religion explore the question of divine hiddenness in considerable detail. The issue is approached from several perspectives including Jewish, Christian, atheist and agnostic. There is (...) coverage of the historical treatment of divine hiddenness as found in the work of Maimonides, St. John of the Cross, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard, and various Biblical writers. A substantial introduction clarifies the main problems of and leading solutions to divine hiddenness. Primarily directed at philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars of religious studies, this collection could also serve as a textbook for upper-level courses in philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This paper summarizes a version of the argument from evil for atheism and then assesses several theodicies, including those that appeal to punishment, evil as a necessary counterpart for good, free will, natural evil as natural consequence, natural law, higher-order goods, and the conjunctive "Big Reason" including all the above and more beside.

In this paper, we outline and critically evaluate Thomas Hofweber’s solution to a semantic puzzle he calls Frege’s Other Puzzle. After sketching the Puzzle and two traditional responses to it—the Substantival Strategy and the Adjectival Strategy—we outline Hofweber’s proposed version of Adjectivalism. We argue that two key components—the syntactic and semantic components—of Hofweber’s analysis both suffer from serious empirical difficulties. Ultimately, this suggests that an altogether different solution to Frege’s Other Puzzle is required.