Would the occurrence of a miracle be evidence for or against the existence of God? Christine Overall and Robert Larmer have a longstanding debate over this question. In this paper, I argue that their respective positive accounts are not quite right and some important criticisms each levies against the other fail. I then move the debate forward by identifying and synthesizing what is correct in their respective accounts.

In this reply to Frank Jankunis’s paper, “Overall and Larmer on Miracles as Evidence for the Existence of God,” I discuss the concept of miracle as a violation of natural law. I argue that, if a miracle were to occur, it would be an epistemic, ontic, and moral evil, and hence evidence against the existence of a perfect God.

In this article, I respond to Frank Jankunis’s criticisms of my arguments concerning the evidential weight events best explained as miracles provide for theism.

In his book, The Structure of Time, William H. Newton-Smith claims that we cannot decide whether the structure of time is continuous or merely dense. I discuss here the extent to which he is correct. I argue that he fails to provide strong enough arguments to defend his claim, but I then suggest how he might overcome this issue. I also argue that we must reconsider the consequences that he draws from his “undecidability result”.

In a well-known paper, John Doris argues that situationist psychology impugns Aristotelian virtue ethics, which presupposes the existence of stable, situation-independent virtues. Maria Merritt responds that a Humean conception of virtue, which is situation-dependent, is immune to this criticism. However, she does not directly address two of Doris’ more trenchant objections, which he presents in the form of a dilemma. In this paper, I respond to Doris’ dilemma, using recent research in psychology and cognitive science to show that virtue ethics, as a dispositionalist, non-codifiable theory, represents a more empirically adequate moral psychology than the leading alternatives.

In this article, I suggest an original solution to the Liar Paradox, based on the pragmatic theory of speech acts. This solution implies making a distinction between two concepts of truth: the intentional truth of a speaker’s utterances directed toward an addressee with the objective of obtaining a consensual agreement; the effective truth objectively recognized by the addressee in the speaker’s utterances. In view of reaching this new solution to the classic paradox, I conduct a critical review of solutions put forward by Tarski, Kripke and Strawson.

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates claims that phthonos and diabolē caused Aristophanes to become one of his accusers. Either Socrates is blowing things out of proportion because Aristophanes was clearly just kidding around, or we are wrong to pass Aristophanes’ humour off as ‘just kidding around.’ In this paper, I defend the second alternative. I argue that Aristophanes is a specific kind of social conservative and that Socrates was the sort of social liberal that bothered Aristophanes. I conclude that Clouds is not innocent, but is, as Socrates claimed, driven by phthonos and diabolē.

It is commonly held that nature is knowable in itself and that death has no explanatory priority in knowing nature. I reject both claims as they undermine an account of the unity of human life, failing, respectively, to thematize the limitations of finite understanding and to acknowledge what’s most certain about finite existence. I use Kant’s idea of the thing in itself and Heidegger’s idea of death to solve two structurally analogous antinomies these failures leave intact. I conclude that to think these ideas is to represent the telos that unifies our living as, respectively, finite knowers and finite beings.