Philosophy

Thomas Aquinas famously argues that it is not necessary to be virtuous in order to be wise. To many contemporary moral philosophers, this claim signals Aquinas’s failure to address the interrelatedness of our moral and intellectual life. I conduct a case study of Ivan Karamazov to demonstrate
that this view is mistaken. After sketching Ivan’s character, I present Aquinas’s accounts of wisdom and pride and their nuanced relationship. I argue that Ivan illustrates the Thomistic view that pride, though not an insurmountable obstacle to one’s acquisition of some intellectual virtues, makes it impossible for anyone to achieve wisdom. The vice of pride therefore proves truly devastating to one’s intellectual life, since wisdom, for Aquinas, is the highest and most important of intellectual virtues.

Since the wife-husband team of Anne Case and Angus Deaton popularized the term deaths of despair, psychologists have become more interested in decoupling despair from clinical depression and anxiety. Despair’s central marker is the loss of hope. It is characterized by feelings of social and spiritual isolation, meaninglessness, hopelessness, helplessness, demoralization, and shame. Causes of despair are complex, ranging from individual (e.g., grief, bad health, addiction, abuse), to societal (e.g., social and cultural dislocation, unemployment, economic disaster, poverty), to a combination of both. Sometimes, acknowledging and/or addressing despair’s material causes is enough. But the problem with despair is that it tends to generate a vicious cycle of self-defeat. Often, it manifests in self-perpetuating negative cognitive biases, self-defeating emotional reactions, and self-destructive behavior. To break free, the person must address the psychological and spiritual roots of her despair. Here, I offer insights from a Christian tradition grounded in the monastic spirituality of the Desert Fathers in the hopes that these might help a therapist seeking to do just that. After distinguishing between an emotion and a sin of despair, I locate the latter’s roots in the vices of acedia and pride. Finally, I point to the virtue of humility as a traditional cure for despair.

Epistemic modals such as 'might' and 'must' have a complex semantics. The standard story is that epistemic modals quantify over a domain of possibilities compatible with what is known. As the relevant domain of knowledge shifts from context to context, so does the truth-value of the epistemic modal sentence. Recent attempts to capture this shiftiness focus on which epistemic base is relevant: that of the speaker or some relevant group, which may or may not include the speaker. In this paper, I argue that epistemic modals are flexible in a way that has gone largely unnoticed. The relevant base for an epistemic modal can be S's total knowledge or some subset of S's knowledge. 'Might p' can be true relative to a restricted body of S's knowledge, even if false relative to S's total knowledge. This flexibility of epistemic modals resolves a recent problem in the literature concerning fallibilism and the standard view of epistemic modals.

ABSTRACTObligations to provide evidence to others arise in many contexts. This paper develops a framework within which to understand what it is to provide evidence to someone. I argue that an initially plausible connection between evidence-providing and evidence-possession fails: it is not the case that in order to count as providing evidence to someone, the intended recipient must have the evidence. I further argue that the following is possible: evidence is provided to an agent, the agent does not have the evidence, but it is not the case that the agent is culpably ignorant of the evidence.

This paper challenges a common assumption in the literature concerning the problem of divine hiddenness, namely, that the following are inconsistent: God's making available adequate evidence for belief that he exists and the existence of non-culpable nonbelievers. It draws on the notions of defeated evidence and glimpses to depict the complexity of our evidential situation with respect to God's existence.

The principle that when one knows p, one is in a good enough epistemic position to treat p as a reason for action is used to motivate pragmatic encroachment. When combined with fallibilism, this principle (Sufficiency) results in the rejection of purism, the view that pragmatic factors are irrelevant to knowledge. Fallibilism, purism, and Sufficiency each have substantial prima facie intuitive support; and yet the three seem to form an inconsistent triad. The author of this chapter challenges the account of reasons that underlies one prominent way of arguing for Sufficiency and then she delineates a position that manages to avoid the trilemma.

No one believes every miracle report they hear. At least, no one I know. For religious and non-religious alike, it is common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is also common to dismiss such testimony outright. This chapter investigates the rationality of failing to believe miracle reports. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume’s argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, I will argue that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument and explore the aptness of as well as some limitations to Hume’s reasoning.