Theism and Contrastive Explanation

Normativity and Contrastive Explanation

My thesis concentrates on the distinction between pro tanto reasons and allthings-considered judgments, and their relation to normative justification. Negatively, it seeks to show that a prevailing kind of account of this relation should be rejected, namely that family of views which takes it that every reason has an associated weight, and the truth with respect to any issue is established by w...

Contrastive explanation and the many absences problem

Explaining events by reference to something which did not happen is common in our daily explanatory practice. The world, it seems, is full of the consequences of things which did not happen and things that were left undone. The wound became septic because it was left untreated. The building succumbed to dry rot because maintenance was neglected. The child suffered because she was not removed fr...

Theism and Dialetheism

The divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence have faced objections to their very consistency. Such objections rely on reasoning parallel to the semantic paradoxes such as the Liar or the set-theoretic paradoxes like Russell’s paradox. With the advent of paraconsistent logics, dialetheism— the view that some contradictions are true — became a major player in the search for a solution to ...

Theism and Physical Cosmology1

Theism & Mathematical Realism

Historically, most mathematicians have believed that mathematical truths such as "2+5=7" exist independently of human minds, being universally and eternally true. Mathematicians believe they are discovering properties of, say, prime numbers, rather than merely inventing them. This view of mathematics dates back to Pythagoras (500 BC) and Plato (400 BC). It is often called “Platonism”. In order ...