Inspired by Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), we develop an argument—the “Scriptural Argument Against Dogmatic Protestantism” (SAADP)—that Protestants who accept the doctrine of sola scriptura cannot reasonably hold that Catholic and Eastern churches are in doctrinal error. If sola scriptura is true and Catholic and Eastern Churches have fallen into error, it is improbable that any Protestant can reliably form true beliefs about controversial points of Christian doctrine, including sola scriptura or suggestions that Catholic and Eastern Christians are in (...) error. We evaluate potential responses to SADDP, considering how SAADP should affect ecumenical doctrinal debates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Got Ethics? Envisioning and Evaluating the Future of Our Guild and DisciplineStacey M. Floyd-Thomas (bio)IN LIGHT OF THE SOCIETY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS’ TWENTY-First Century and 2020 Initiatives, several ad hoc committees and working groups have examined the fate and future of both the Society and the field of Christian ethics. The stated purposes of these initiatives and their correlative task forces were to think about a new era that (...) is ostensibly different from the state of the discipline of Christian ethics and the demographics of the Society in the past. In effect, each initiative was charged with addressing the evolving needs of our field, particularly giving attention to our mission, membership, meeting, media, management, and mass appeal. There has also been considerable attention paid to our relevance in an academy and society where underrepresented groups of color are no longer minorities in the demographic composition of the United States. Further, numerous discussions have focused on the shifting dynamics of a global and postsecular age. Each initiative therefore chose to focus its attention on the practices of the Society in order to expand our ethical conversations with ethicists in other cultures, traditions, and institutional settings. Finally, each initiative executed its own inventory, and recommendations to the board and membership emerged.The 2016 preconference workshop titled “Got Ethics?” was a roundtable discussion that was an effort to make good on the hard work of those initiatives and the good intentions of the SCE board. Herein four ethicists—namely, Gloria Albrecht, Agnes Chiu, Gary Dorrien, and Miguel De La Torre, joined me in the quest to revisit the implications that a diverse demographic and discipline as well as the developing global context may pose for the future of our scholarship and society. Each panelist stated hard truths for these troubling times that poignantly mark both the crises of theological education and the church, and even more urgently for the future of our discipline and our Society as Christian ethicists. [End Page 195]Gary Dorrien offered a rigorous overview of the history of Christian social ethics that coalesced around the ever-growing gap that threatens its viability:Today, as in previous generations, some ethicists work hard at straddling the divide between social justice activism and disciplinary scholarship. For many of us, our purview consists entirely of ethicists fitting this description. All of us up here work hard at doing both things and we struggle with the trade-offs of doing so. I have completed my assignment and my time is up, but I have a cautionary conclusion. Unlike previous generations of social ethicists, we cannot assume that our field has a future. The existence of our field is in jeopardy except in Catholic institutions. On the road I have talked with many academic administrators who are skeptical that their schools need to teach anything called Christian ethics or comparative religious ethics or social ethics. We cannot settle for merely asserting that our work is relevant and that our field has an established standing. The weight of presumption is shifting against us. The field is shrinking, and we must prove that our work is substantial and relevant.1As Dorrien traces the history of social ethics as a discipline, beginning with the rise of the Social Gospel and its modern social consciousness, he also causes us to reflect on our postmodern consciousness as well. Social ethics began with black and white Social Gospel ministers who preached radical social change; however, Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism tempered this radical vision, moving the discipline in a more moderate direction. Today social ethics remains in a crisis of identity and relevance, caught between the need to establish itself as a discipline in its own right and the ethical exigency of speaking directly to social injustices.As an emerging moral theologian, Agnes Chiu echoes Dorrien’s perspective by asserting thatChristian ethics is a discipline that intersects and calls for Christian engagement with the world. It enables Christianity to be relevant because it deals with issues with which the world wrestles such as justice, conflicts, and human dignity. Theologians have long warned against the danger of irrelevancy and indifference by both our discipline and the... (shrink)

If you were to take a time machine and travel back to the 1980s, Catholic epistemology would look drastically different than it does today, at least in analytic circles. One of those drastic changes relates to whether Catholic epistemology is consistent with Reformed epistemology. Another issue relates to whether St. Thomas Aquinas was a classical evidentialist. In this paper, I survey recent developments in Catholic epistemology. I do this by first looking at Gregory Stacey's recent work arguing the Catholic (...) Church's teaching on faith is best situated in a Reformed epistemological framework. I then engage decades old objections to Reformed epistemology from a Catholic perspective. I respond to these objections partly by surveying recent work by Catholic epistemologists. The paper then takes a turn to look at the recent scholarship on Aquinas' epistemology. I show that there is now an emerging consensus that Aquinas belongs not to a hard evidentialist camp as it was previously thought, but rather an externalist friendly tradition. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of religion is the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences—especially psychology and cognitive science—and bringing them to bear on issues within philosophy of religion toward explicit philosophical ends. This paper introduces readers to experimental philosophy of religion. §1 explores the contours of experimental philosophy of religion by contrasting it with a few related fields: the psychology of religion and cognitive science of religion, on the one hand, and natural theology, on the other. §2 (...) offers a brief history of experimental philosophy of religion. The goal in this section is to highlight the ancient pedigree of this emerging area of research; as the contemporary experimental philosophy of religion literature expands and proliferates, it’s important to remember that this field has deep historical roots. Then, §3 focuses on the following questions: Why should we care about experimental philosophy of religion? And why is it needed? (shrink)

In this paper I add credence to Linda Zagzebski's (1994) diagnosis of Gettier problems (and the current trend to abandon the standard analysis) by analyzing the nature of luck. It is widely accepted that the lesson to be learned from Gettier problems is that knowledge is incompatible with luck or at least a certain species thereof. As such, understanding the nature of luck is central to understanding the Gettier problem. Thanks by and large to Duncan Pritchard's seminal work, Epistemic Luck, (...) a great deal of literature has been developed recently concerning the nature of luck and anti-luck epistemology. The literature, however, has yet to explore the very intuitive idea that luck comes in degrees. I propose that once luck is recognized to admit degrees even the slightest non-zero degree (of the relevant sort) precludes knowledge. Connecting this to Zagzebski's thesis, I propose that a given theory of warrant must guarantee truth in order to avoid Gettier counterexamples (or subsequently deny that warrant bears any relationship to the truth whatsoever), simply because a sufficient standard analysis of knowledge cannot allow for knowledge that is even marginally lucky. (shrink)

The problem of evil is an ideal topic for experimental philosophy. Suffering--which is at the heart of most prominent formulations of the problem of evil--is a universal human experience and has been the topic of careful reflection for millennia. However, interpretations of suffering and how it bears on the existence of God are tremendously diverse and nuanced. We might immediately find ourselves wondering why (and how!) something so universal might be understood in so many different ways. Why does suffering push (...) some people toward atheism while pushing others toward deeper faith? What cultural, psychological, or sociological differences account for this diversity of responses? And, importantly, what light might this diversity of responses shed on the problem of evil and how it has been formulated by philosophers in recent years? The primary aim of this paper is to highlight how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to the problem of evil. In the first section, we review some recent work in this area and describe the current state of this emergent body of literature. In the second section, we review the broader and more recent theoretical developments on the problem of evil. Finally, in the final section, we outline some potential areas of future empirical research that we see as especially promising given those developments. (shrink)

The introduction to a special issue of Religious Studies on the theme of experimental philosophy of religion.

According to a widely credited model in the business ethics literature, ethical decisions are a function of two kinds of factors, personal(individual) and situational, and these factors interact with each other. According to a contrary view of decision making that is widely held in some areas of business research, individuals’ decisions about ethical issues (and subsequent actions) are purely a function of their self-interest.The laboratory experiment reported in this paper provides a test of the person-situation interactionist model, using the general (...) theoretical and experimental framework used in the experimental economics literature. One individual and two situational factors relating to moral intensity were examined which may influence decisions to misrepresent information in the course of business activities.The individual and one situational variable were significantly related to participants’ actions. The interactions among individual andsituation variables were not individually significant, although the model including interactions had a much higher level of statistical significance. Gender was significant, both directly and in interaction with moral development, suggesting that it may be worthy of further examination. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to highlight, at least in short, how the resources of experimental philosophy could be fruitfully applied to the evidential problem of evil. To do this, we will consider two of the most influential and archetypal formulations of the problem: William L. Rowe’s article, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (1979). and Paul Draper’s article, “Pain and Pleasure: An Evidential Problem for Theists” (1989). We will consider the relevance of experimental philosophy (...) to Rowe’s 1979 argument in §1 and to Draper’s 1989 argument in §2. But in addition to exploring how the resources of experimental philosophy might apply to the problem of evil, it is also worth exploring what broader empirical factors might contribute to people having the intuitions that have—from someone’s affective state to someone’s need for closure. In §3, we want to very briefly elucidate a few areas where the psychology of philosophy might be productively explored in future empirical research. (shrink)

Background: Compassion fatigue is recognized as impacting the health and effectiveness of healthcare providers, and consequently, patient care. Compassion fatigue is distinct from “burnout.” Reliable measurement tools, such as the Professional Quality of Life scale, have been developed to measure the prevalence, and predict risk of compassion fatigue. This study reviews the prevalence of compassion fatigue among healthcare practitioners, and relationships to demographic variables. Methods: A systematic review was conducted using key words in MEDLINE, PubMed, and Ovid databases. Data were (...) extracted from a total of 71 articles meeting inclusion criteria, from studies measuring compassion fatigue in healthcare providers using a validated instrument. Quantitative and qualitative data were extracted and compiled by three independent reviewers into an evidence table that included basic study characteristics, study strength and quality determination, measurements of compassion fatigue, and general findings. Meta-analysis, where data allowed, was stratified by Professional Quality of Life version, heterogeneity was quantified, and pooled means were reported with 95% confidence interval. A table of major study characteristics and results was created. Ethical consideration: This paper contains no primary data obtained directly from research participants. Data obtained from previously published resources have been acknowledged within references. Psychological distress, particularly compassion fatigue, can be insidious, no health profession is immune, and may significantly impact the ability to provide care. Results: A total of 71 studies were included. Compassion fatigue was reported across all practitioner groups studied. Relationships to most demographic variables such as years of experience and specialty were either not statistically significant or unclear. Variability in reporting of Professional Quality of Life results was found. Interpretation: Compassion fatigue exists across diverse practitioner groups. Prevalence is highly variable, and its relationship with demographic, personal, and/or professional variables is inconsistent. Questions are raised about how to mitigate compassion fatigue. (shrink)

While experimental philosophy has fruitfully applied the tools and resources of psychology and cognitive science to debates within epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, relatively little work has been done within philosophy of religion. And this isn’t due to a lack of need! Philosophers of religion frequently rely on empirical claims that can be either verified or disproven, but without exploring whether they are. And philosophers of religion frequently appeal to intuitions which may vary wildly according to education level, theological background, etc., (...) without concern for whether or not the psychological mechanisms that underwrite those intuitions are broadly shared or reliable. In this chapter, I explore some of the fruit and possibilities for the emerging field of experimental philosophy of religion. First, in Section 1, I will elucidate some of the historical grounding for experimental philosophy of religion. Then in Section 2, I briefly consider how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to a seminal topic within philosophy of religion, namely, the problem of evil. In Section 3, we’ll sketch some broader applications of experimental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

While the evidential problem of evil has been enormously influential within the contemporary philosophical literature—William Rowe’s 1979 formulation in “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” being the most seminal—no academic research has explored what cognitive mechanisms might underwrite the appearance of pointlessness in target examples of suffering. In this exploratory paper, we show that the perception of pointlessness in the target examples of suffering that underwrite Rowe’s seminal formulation of the problem of evil is contingent on the (...) absence of broader context. In other words, we show that when such suffering is presented alongside broader contextual information, the appearance of pointlessness, on average, significantly diminishes. In §1 we briefly elucidate Rowe’s formulation of the problem of evil and the thought experiment that motivates a key premise. In §2 and §3 respectively, we briefly explain our hypothesis regarding Rowe’s case and our methods for testing these hypotheses. In §4, we elucidate our results, and in §5 we explore some of the philosophical implications of our findings and gesture towards some areas for future research. Finally, in §6, we briefly connect our research to some of the established philosophical literature on suffering and narrative before concluding. (shrink)

Different notions of objectivity support different notions of what is required for a moral value or obligation to be experienced as objective. If the objectivity of a property requires that it can exist even when we fail to notice its existence, then experiencing a property as objective will require that we imagine it appearing in some way that is not presently available to us. Explaining what that imagining involves is the central task of this paper. Defending the epistemic value of (...) such imagining is a secondary aim. (shrink)

We can assent to a proposition, build a theory around it, base our actions on it, and affirm its truth—without ever taking it to heart. This frequently happens, for example, to recipients of bad news who figure out what is entailed by the news, make appropriate plans, and pass the news on to others—all without really "taking it in." It happens to those who accept a scientific claim without abandoning their more private views of how things work, and it happens (...) to members of a jury who confidently arrive at a verdict of "guilty" yet remain, on some deeper level, unconvinced. Conversely, people may dismiss their prejudices as mere prejudices while continuing to hold onto them, and a friend may acknowledge a remark to be innocuous yet be offended. Such phenomena are widespread, diverse, and philosophically intriguing. They are not simply cases of weak versus strong belief, or belief that something has a low probability versus a high probability ; nor are they cases of accepting on authority what we only partially understand. Rather, in each case, there is certain lack of depth to one's beliefs. (shrink)

Central to aesthetic experience, but also to experience in general, is the phenomenon of ‘seeing as'. We see a painting as a landscape, we hear sequence of sounds as a melody, we see a wooden contraption as a boat, and we hear a comment as an insult. There are interesting and important differences between these cases of ‘seeing as': the painting cannot literally be a landscape while the wooden contraption can literally be a boat; a failure to hear sounds as (...) a melody may count as a shortcoming whereas the failure to hear a comment as an insult may be admirable. Here I want to focus mainly on their similarities, however -- similarities that will lead us back to Kant, and to the nature of consciousness itself. The phenomenon of ‘seeing as’ presents certain familiar puzzles: how is seeing a painting as a landscape different from seeing a landscape, on the one hand, and from thinking of the painting as a landscape, on the other? ‘Seeing as’ is not the same as misperceiving, nor is it the same as offering an interpretation, yet it seems related to both. These puzzles are articulated in Section I, and some candidate solutions are rejected. Section II develops a Kantian account of experience showing how the convergence of conflicting representations, achieved through imaginative syntheses, is essential to the experience of objects and to consciousness itself. Kant's insights are used to evaluate some recent responses to the so-called ‘binding problem’ -- the problem of explaining how the contents of consciousness are bound together, and the role of the imagination is further detailed. Section III then returns to the difference between ordinary seeing and ‘seeing as', offering an explanation of the latter in terms of the framework developed in Section II. (shrink)

Lectures from experts in scientific research, law, insurance, philosophy, ethics, theology and public policy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy by Donovan Miyasaki, and: Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left by Donovan MiyasakiJeffrey ChurchDonovan Miyasaki, Nietzsche's Immoralism: Politics as First Philosophy Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 292 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-11358-1. Cloth, $54.99.Donovan Miyasaki, Politics after Morality: Toward a Nietzschean Left Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. xv + 330 pp. isbn: 978-3-031-12227-9. Cloth, $54.99.Without a doubt, Nietzsche's political philosophy is one of (...) the most elusive and ambiguous features of his corpus. How else can we explain the dizzying, even contradictory, variety of interpretations of Nietzsche's politics? Some read him as anti-political or a liberal skeptical of state power. For others, he is an aristocratic radical, obsessed with using state power to entrench a new class of Übermenschen. For still others, his thought is most compatible with democracy, as his defenses of perspectivism and agonism are best realized within a democratic political system. Finally, some other scholars throw up their hands and say that Nietzsche's political thought is incoherent.In this two-volume work, Donovan Miyasaki enters this fray with a distinctive defense of the democratic Nietzsche. Two features distinguish his view from others. First, it provides a novel grounding of Nietzschean democracy—what Miyasaki calls Nietzsche's "metapolitics." This grounding is examined in the first volume, Nietzsche's Immoralism (hereafter NI). Second, it offers the most radical political vision of a left Nietzschean form of Nietzschean socialism. For Miyasaki, socialism follows from Nietzsche's fundamental commitments, rather than the aristocratic radicalism that Miyasaki sees Nietzsche inferring—wrongly—from his own commitments. [End Page 97] This extrapolation from Nietzsche's "metapolitics" is undertaken in the second volume, Politics after Morality (hereafter PM). I discuss each of these contributions in turn. In general, I found Miyasaki's work to be clear, perceptive, and bold in their interpretations. That said, with a book that critiques so much of the Nietzsche scholarship and offers such a radical take on Nietzsche's politics, I have some potential objections to raise.Nietzsche's MetapoliticsOther interpreters of a left Nietzsche ground their reading on what they take to be Nietzsche's radical epistemological views: either his perspectivism or his anti-essentialism. This was a popular approach for the postmodern and agonistic readings. By contrast, Miyasaki grounds Nietzschean democracy in a completely different way, on his metaphysics, particularly his determinism and "hard incompatibilism" (NI 25). On Miyasaki's view, Nietzsche denies that freedom and determinism are compatible and hence also that any kind of moral responsibility or moral agency is possible. This is the meaning of Nietzsche's "immoralism." For Miyasaki, Nietzsche's alternative ideal is to engender a particular feeling, namely, the love of this determinism or amor fati.This thesis of hard incompatibilism leads Miyasaki to some sweeping critiques of scholarship on Nietzsche's ethics. Against the many recent interpreters who develop a Nietzschean view of freedom, Miyasaki argues that freedom is impossible in a deterministic world. Against the perfectionist and constitutivist interpreters of Nietzsche's ethics, Miyasaki argues that ethics requires the freedom to improve or fail, and such freedom is impossible. At the same time, Miyasaki admits that Nietzsche at times appeals to and even defends freedom. Yet he explains that what Nietzsche is after in these passages is not freedom, but only the "feeling" of freedom (NI 49). Miyasaki is driven to some strained interpretive moves, such as when he argues that higher individuals' feeling of freedom is enhanced precisely to the degree to which they have abandoned the "illusion of freedom" (NI 49). How can I have the feeling of something I have come to see as an illusion?It is true that Nietzsche critiques the traditional metaphysical notion of the freedom of the will on the basis of his naturalism and determinism. Yet in recent years, scholars have argued that Nietzsche defends a novel conception of freedom that is compatible with determinism, akin to what we find in Spinoza. On this view, freedom is defined in terms of agency rather [End Page 98] than a power or faculty of choice. A free agent is... (shrink)

While experimental philosophy has fruitfully applied the tools and resources of psychology and cognitive science to debates within epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, relatively little work has been done within philosophy of religion. And this isn’t due to a lack of need! Philosophers of religion frequently rely on empirical claims that can be either verified or disproven, but without exploring whether they are. And philosophers of religion frequently appeal to intuitions which may vary wildly according to education level, theological background, etc., (...) without concern for whether or not the psychological mechanisms that underwrite those intuitions are broadly shared or reliable. In this chapter, I explore some of the fruit and possibilities for the emerging field of experimental philosophy of religion. First, in Section 1, I will elucidate some of the historical grounding for experimental philosophy of religion. Then in Section 2, I briefly consider how the tools and resources of experimental philosophy might be fruitfully applied to a seminal topic within philosophy of religion, namely, the problem of evil. In Section 3, we’ll sketch some broader applications of experimental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The Gettier dilemma facing reductive analyses of knowledge has not been properly appreciated by virtue epistemologist or even virtue epistemology’s most vocal critics. In §1, we start by considering how recent critics of virtue epistemology understand the Gettier Problem facing virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge. I highlight how the dilemma facing virtue- theoretic analyses of knowledge is more general than these critics seem to suggest. In §2, I elucidate the worry that the threat facing virtue epistemology is really a dilemma between (...) Gettier counterexamples and radical skepticism. In §3, we will consider how some recent virtue epistemologists have tried to viably defuse the Gettier Problem. We will see (i) just how the critiques elucidated in §1 have (mis)shaped the dialectic between virtue epistemology and what is required in solving Gettier counterexamples and (ii) how this has led to virtue epistemologists underestimating the widespread insidiousness of Gettier counterexamples. (shrink)

In this exploratory paper, I consider how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might contribute to the failure of testimonial exchanges. In §1, I will briefly highlight four broad ways a testimonial exchange might fail. In §2, I will very briefly review the nature of epistemic injustice. In §3, I will explore how both epistemic injustice and intellectual humility can lead to failures in testimonial exchange, and I’ll conclude by suggesting how intellectual humility and epistemic injustice might be related.

This study evaluated the biological dimension of meditation and self-transcendent states. A convenience sample of 513 participants was drawn from attendees at a 4-day guided meditation workshop. Half were randomly assigned to an active placebo control intervention. All were assessed on a variety of measures, both psychological [anxiety, pain, posttraumatic stress disorder, positive emotions, and transcendent states], and physiological. Additional biological assessments including salivary immunoglobulin-A, cortisol, and Quantitative Electroencephalography were obtained from subset of the Experimental group. No significant difference in (...) psychological symptoms or positive emotions was observed between Experimental and placebo groups at baseline. At post-test, significant improvements were noted in the Experimental group, including a 49.5% median increase in SIgA, though cortisol remained unchanged. qEEG z-score analysis identified sustained stress reduction, including delta frequency band amplitude increases, high beta decreases, and faster acquisition of sustained alpha states. Psychological symptoms also improved on all measures. At 6-month follow-up, PTSD and somatic symptoms significantly improved from baseline, and post-test versus 6-month follow-up results indicated significant increases in happiness and spiritual and physical oneness, along with decreases in depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that autonomic self-regulation and transcendent states may be measured in both biological and psychological dimensions and are associated with pervasive health benefits. (shrink)

Scholars have recently argued that Friedrich Schiller makes a signal contribution to republican political theory in his view of “aesthetic education,” which offers a means of elevating self-interest to virtue. However, though this education is lauded in theory, it has been denigrated as implausible, irresponsible, or dangerous in practice. This paper argues that the criticisms rest on a faulty assumption that artistic objects constitute the sole substance of this “aesthetic education.” Through a reading of Schiller’s work throughout the 1790s, I (...) make the case that this “education” occurs also through an encounter with the “moral beauty” of individual exemplars. This interpretation fits with Schiller’s republican allegiances, saves Schiller’s project from political irrelevance, and enriches Schiller’s contribution to contemporary republican political theory. However, I argue that Schiller was attentive to the dangers of this “aesthetic education” in his play Wallenstein, in which Schiller dramatizes the tragic relationship between individual exemplar and political order. (shrink)