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Philosophy

UMSL Library Guide to Philosophy

Welcome

Find out more about the Philosophy department at UMSL on their homepage ( https://www.umsl.edu/~philo/ ).  

This guide is to help you find out about databases and select web resources related to Philosophy, as well as searching for and finding articles, books and more from the UMSL Library and about citing your research.

Philosophy Faculty Works

  • Necessary Existent TheologyThis link opens in a new windowOct 31, 2023

    A meta-theology makes claims about the structure of theological claims: it identifies a single, fundamental claim about God, and shows how other theological claims are derivable from the fundamental claim. In his book Depicting Deity and other articles, Jon Kvanvig has identified three distinct meta-theologies: Creator Theology, Perfect Being Theology, and Worship-worthiness Theology. In this article, we argue that the medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna's views about God have the structure of a meta-theology, and that it is distinct from the three projects Kvanvig identifies. This view is Necessary Existent Theology.

  • The Problem of Evil and the Grammar of GoodnessThis link opens in a new windowOct 7, 2022

    I consider the two venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Both presume that it is coherent to predicate goodness (or greatness) of God. But if Peter Geach’s claim that goodness is logically attributive is cogent, then both arguments fall to the ground.

  • Kant's Argument from the Applicability of GeometryThis link opens in a new windowOct 7, 2022

    In this paper I develop a reading of Kant's argument from geometry based on distinguishing the roles of pure versus applied geometry. Once these roles are properly distinguished, I argue that the argument from geometry is not susceptible to the problems concerning the development and applications of non-Euclidean geometry, which are often thought to undermine the argument.

  • The Evolution of Psychological AltruismThis link opens in a new windowOct 7, 2022

    We argue that there are two different kinds of altruistic motivation: classical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms at least partly for those organisms’ sake, and nonclassical psychological altruism, which generates ultimate desires to help other organisms for the sake of the organism providing the help. We then argue that classical psychological altruism is adaptive if the desire to help others is intergenerationally reliable and, thus, need not be learned. Nonclassical psychological altruism is adaptive when the desire to help others is adaptively learnable. This theory opens new avenues for the interdisciplinary study of psychological altruism.