Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs?

In a fallen world fraught with evidence against religious beliefs, it is tempting to think that, on the assumption that those beliefs are true, the best way to protect them is to hold them dogmatically. Dogmatic belief, which is highly confident and resistant to counterevidence, may fail to exhibit epistemic virtues such as humility and may instead manifest epistemic vices such as arrogance or servility, but if this is the price of secure belief in religious truths, so be it. I argue, however, that even in a world full of misleading evidence against true religious beliefs, cultivating epistemic humility is the better way to achieve believers’ epistemic aims. The reason is that dogmatic belief courts certain epistemic dangers, including to the true religious beliefs themselves, whereas epistemic humility empowers believers to counter them

Religious Evidentialism

Should religious believers proportion their religious beliefs to their evidence? They should: Religious faith is better, ceteris paribus, when the beliefs accompanying it are evidence-proportioned. I offer two philosophical arguments and a biblical argument. The philosophical arguments conclude that love and trust, two attitudes belonging to faith, are better, ceteris paribus, when accompanied by evidence-proportioned belief, and that so too is the faith in question. The biblical argument concludes that beliefs associated with faith, portrayed in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, are typically, and normatively, exhorted on the basis of evidence. I hope to convince religious believers and nonbelievers alike that religious beliefs should be evidence-proportioned

Resolving Religious Disagreements

Resolving religious disagreements is difficult, for beliefs about religion tend to come with strong biases against other views and the people who hold them. Evidence can help, but there is no agreed-upon policy for weighting it, and moreover bias affects the content of our evidence itself. Another complicating factor is that some biases are reliable and others unreliable. What we need is an evidence-weighting policy geared toward negotiating the effects of bias. I consider three evidence-weighting policies in the philosophy of religion and advocate one of them as the best for promoting the resolution of religious disagreements

Evidence-Seeking as an Expression of Faith

Faith is often regarded as having a fraught relationship with evidence. Lara Buchak even argues that it entails foregoing evidence, at least when this evidence would influence your decision to act on the proposition in which you have faith. I present a counterexample inspired by the book of Job, in which seeking evidence for the sake of deciding whether to worship God is not only compatible with faith, but is in fact an expression of great faith. One might still think that foregoing evidence may make faith more praiseworthy than otherwise. But I argue against this claim too, once more drawing on Job. A faith that expresses itself by a search for evidence can be more praiseworthy than a faith that sits passively in the face of epistemic adversity

Argument from Personal Narrative: A Case Study of Rachel Moran's Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution

Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical arguments should be systematic and transparent. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, but their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We’ll see that narrative arguments can enjoy expository Advantages over analytic ones

The Epistemic Benefits of Religious Disagreement

Scientific researchers welcome disagreement as a way of furthering epistemic aims. Religious communities, by contrast, tend to regard it as a potential threat to their beliefs. But I argue that religious disagreement can help achieve religious epistemic aims. I do not argue this by comparing science and religion, however. For scientific hypotheses are ideally held with a scholarly neutrality, and my aim is to persuade those who are committed to religious beliefs that religious disagreement can be epistemically beneficial for them too

Effect of diabetes on the cutaneous microcirculation of the feet in patients with intermittent claudication

Aims: To evaluate endothelial-dependent and -independent cutaneous vasodilator responses in the feet of patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) with or without Type 2 diabetes. Methods: Cutaneous microvascular responses in the dorsum of both lower limbs were measured in the supine position using Laser Doppler Fluximetry combined with iontophoretic administration of endothelial-dependent (acetylcholine, Ach) and -independent (sodium nitroprusside, SNP) vasodilators in diabetic (n = 19) and non diabetic (n = 17) patients with PAD (presenting as unilateral calf intermittent claudication (IC). Results: In patients with diabetes and IC, endothelial-dependent vasodilation was significantly impaired in the symptomatic limb [74 (57,105) vs 68 (24,81) PU, Z = -2.79, p = 0.005] compared to the asymptomatic limb. Patients without diabetes showed no impairment of vasodilation. Resting ankle-brachial pressure index did not identify the presence of abnormalities in microvascular function. Conclusions: The combination of diabetes and PAD is associated with a reduction in endothelial-dependent cutaneous vasodilation in the feet without an associated reduction in endothelial independent vasodilation.</p

Persistent Organic Pollutant in the Venetian coastal environment

The Venetian coastal area is characterized by a strong anthropogenic impact and its quality is very important because of local economical activities, such as tourism or fishing. In the context of the Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000/60/EC), the aim of the project Q-ALiVe (Qualità dell’Ambiente Litoraneo Veneto) is to check the environmental quality of the Venetian coastal area and whether rivers contamination could influence it. We studied an area going from the mouth of the Adige river to the Malamocco inlet of the Venice lagoon (including the mouth of the Brenta river and the Chioggia lagoon inlet), to distance from the coast of up to about a kilometer. In this work we presented the data relative to Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) as PCBs, PBDEs and PAHs, in samples of seawater. Samples were collected during four different sampling campaigns, in different seasons (June 2011, August 2011, September 2011, November 2011); in each sampling campaign we collected 10 samples of surface water. Analytical samples procedures for POPs include liquid-liquid continuous extraction, followed by an automated purification step, with neutral silica columns. Analysis were made by HRGC-HRMS (PCBs) or HRGC-LRMS (PAHs and PBDEs). Quantification was made by isotope dilution. Results suggest a negligible influence of rivers contamination to the quality of the sea facing the city of Chioggia and the Venice lagoon. Funds for this work were provided, in the framework of Q-ALiVe Project, by the Regione del Veneto - L.R. 15/07

Introduction: An Overview of Trust and Some Key Epistemological Applications

I give an overview of the trust literature and then of six central issues concerning epistemic trust. The survey of trust zeroes in on the kinds of expectations that trust involves, trust’s characteristic psychology, and what makes trust rational. The discussion of epistemic trust focuses on its role in testimony, the epistemic goods that we trust for, the significance of epistemic trust in contrast to reliance, what makes epistemic trust rational, and epistemic self-trust

An Investigation into Textual Characteristics of the Early Greek Majuscule Pandects

In this thesis, I analyse the textual characteristics of the four Greek, majuscule pandects (01, 02, 03 and 04). By “textual characteristics”, I mean how these manuscripts vary from the initial text as we can best reconstruct it. The term is similar in meaning to “scribal habits”, but rather than referring to the habitual behaviour of the scribe of the manuscript under investigation, “textual characteristics” refers to all the ways in which the manuscript differs from the initial text, both those introduced by its own scribe and by the scribes of all its exemplars. I defend my focus on textual characteristics, rather than scribal habits, by arguing that it is difficult to determine which variant readings were introduced to a manuscript by its own scribe. Royse argues that singular readings were normally introduced by the scribe of the manuscript, but I present a number of arguments against his approach. I also consider the method of Min and Aland, who argue that we should examine textual characteristics by comparing manuscripts to a published critical text. This is likely to be circular, because critical texts are frequently produced using assumptions which favour particular manuscripts. My own method works by attempting to reconstruct the initial text at a range of variation units, giving no weight to “good” manuscripts, just because they are favoured by scholars. I then consider how the manuscripts under investigation differ from this reconstructed initial text. I survey sample chapters in John, Romans, Revelation, Judges and Sirach. The discussion of specific variants in these various books forms the bulk of the thesis. I chose this range of books to be able to survey the wide range of types of literature represented in the pandects and see how textual characteristics varied between them. Working on Judges also allowed me to analyse the “new finds” of 01, which include several pages of text from Judges. In the portion of Judges which I surveyed, 01 and 03 not infrequently agree against all the rest of the B-group of Judges manuscripts, which suggests that they may be closely related. My observations of 04 sometimes challenge the generally accepted transcriptions by Lyon and Tischendorf. In considering the history of the manuscripts, I argue that 01 and 03 may plausibly have been among the manuscripts made in response to the Imperial commissions by Constantine and Constans, recorded by Eusebius and Athanasius. My research has yielded a number of interesting conclusions. In general, across all the manuscripts and for all the varying types of passage sampled, the pandects generally preserve the initial text well. For most pandects, in most books, the mean number of changes from the initial text per ten verses is comfortably below 10.0. Within the changes that can be observed, transcriptional and linguistic variations are more common than harmonisations or changes of content. The more precise profiles of each manuscript vary considerably between Biblical books. The pandects thus create bibliographic unity out of textual diversity. This underlines their significance in the history of the Christian Bible: they reflect in bibliographic form the important hermeneutical move to consider all the books of the Christian Bible as one corpus.My main, official source of funding was the AHRC, which paid my living and maintenance. I also received grants to go to conferences and discuss my research from the AHRC, Christ's College and the Divinity Faculty