Paul Thagard uses new accounts of brain mechanisms and social interactions to forge theories of mind, knowledge, reality, morality, justice, meaning, and the arts. Natural Philosophy brings new methods for analyzing concepts, understanding values, and achieving coherence. It shows how to unify the humanities with the cognitive and social sciences.

People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b confirms a novel prediction of the new explanation, the reverse (...) action effect, in which people judge inactions to be more causal than actions in overdetermination cases. Experiment 2 directly compares the two effects in joint-causation and overdetermination scenarios and conceptually replicates them with new scenarios. Taken together, these studies provide support for the new counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgment. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Long before skeptical theism was called “skeptical theism,” Stephen Wykstra (1984) defended a version of it based on an epistemological principle he called CORNEA. In this paper, I use elementary confirmation theory to analyze CORNEA’s core. This enables me to show precisely what is right about Wykstra’s very influential defense of skeptical theism and, perhaps more importantly, precisely what is wrong with it. A key premise of that defense is that, on the assumption that God exists, we wouldn’t expect to (...) know what God’s reasons for allowing certain evils are. I show that, while that premise together with CORNEA’s core shows that our inability to adequately explain the existence of those evils in terms of theism is not strong evidence against theism, it fails to show that the evils themselves are not strong evidence against theism. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications for classical theism of the possibility that God makes “hard choices.” A choice between two actions is hard if the chooser believes that each action is better than the other in some respects, but believes neither that one action is better overall than the other nor that the two actions are equally valuable overall. Even an omniscient God might be forced to make hard choices if, as seems plausible, “better than,” “worse than,” and “equal in (...) value to” do not exhaust the relevant value relations that one action can bear to another. This paper seeks to show that, if God does make hard choices of a certain sort, then God can be essentially perfectly rational and still have morally significant freedom. This is important because maximal praiseworthiness both requires morally significant freedom and, like perfect rationality, is required for divinity in the classical sense. (shrink)

Includes a chapter on visual perception.

Criminal Law Conversations provides an authoritative overview of contemporary criminal law debates in the United States. This collection of high caliber scholarly papers was assembled using an innovative and interactive method of nominations and commentary by the nation's top legal scholars. Virtually every leading scholar in the field has participated, resulting in a volume of interest to those both in and outside of the community. Criminal Law Conversations showcases the most captivating of these essays, and provides insight into the most (...) fundamental and provocative questions of modern criminal law. (shrink)

Despite the growing appreciation of the relevance of affect to cognition, analogy researchers have paid remarkably little attention to emotion. This paper discusses three general classes of analogy that involve emotions. The most straightforward are analogies and metaphors about emotions, for example "Love is a rose and you better not pick it." Much more interesting are analogies that involve the transfer of emotions, for example in empathy in which people understand the emotions of others by imagining their own emotional reactions (...) in similar situations. Finally, there are analogies that generate emotions, for example analogical jokes that generate emotions such as surprise and amusement. (shrink)

The first sustained phenomenological approach to modern art, taking a new approach and drawing upon an unsual selection of thinkers.

After two centuries of Kant interpretation there is still no general agreement over the nature of Kant’s most basic philosophical commitments. One issue in particular about which it is difficult to find consensus is his metaphilosophical attitude towards the very project of metaphysics itself. Recently, a type of deflationist reading of Kant has been appealed to in order to address the problems inherent in his more traditional construal as a metaphysical skeptic who denies us the capacity to have any knowledge (...) of “things in themselves”, but who nevertheless seems to centrally rely on the existence of just such things.1 But how is either deflationism or skepticism consistent with Kant’s avowed intention in the Critique of Pure Reason to put metaphysics on the path of science,2 or with his signaled but unfulfilled intention to write a “Metaphysics of Nature”? (shrink)

This essay-based test assesses the extent to which students have acquired the reading and writing abilities required for skilled analysis and evaluation. Developed by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, the test is designed for secondary and higher education students and fosters close reading and substantive writing abilities.