This paper defends the epistemological importance of 'diachronic' or cross-temporal evaluation of epistemic agents against an interesting dilemma posed for this view in Trent Dougherty's recent paper "Reducing Responsibility." This is primarily a debate between evidentialists and character epistemologists, and key issues of contention that the paper treats include the divergent functions of synchronic and diachronic (longitudinal) evaluations of agents and their beliefs, the nature and sources of epistemic normativity, and the advantages versus the costs of the evidentialists' reductionism about sources of epistemic normativity.
The thesis of this short paper is that skeptical theism does not look very plausi ble from the perspective of a common sense epistemology. A corollary of this is that anyone who finds common sense epistemology plausible and is attracted to skeptical theism has some work to do to show that they can form a plausible whole. The dialectical situation is that to the degree that this argument is a strong one, to that same degree (at least) the theorist who would like to com bine common sense epistemology with skeptical theism has some work to do. I. What Is Skeptical Theism? In short, skeptical theism is a response to the evidential problem of evil, most notably formulated by William Rowe thusly:3
One Berkeleyan case for idealism, recently developed by Robert M. Adams, relies on a seeming disparity between our concepts of matter and mind. Thomas Reid’s critique of idealism directly challenges the alleged disparity. After highlighting the role of the disparity thesis in Adams’s updated Berkeleyan argument for idealism, this chapter offers an updated version of Reid’s challenge, and assesses its strength. What emerges from this historico-philosophical investigation is that a contemporary Reidian has much work to do to transpose her objections to Berkeley into good objections to Adams’s argument.
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