Daniel Bonevac

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Texas at Austin

John Calvin holds that the fall radically changed humanity’s moral and epistemic capacities. Recognizing that should lead Christian philosophers to see that philosophical questions require at least two sets of answers: one reflecting our nature and capacities before the fall, and the other reflecting our nature and capacities after the fall. Our pr...

This paper develops a metaphysically flexible theory of quantification broad enough to incorporate many distinct theories of objects. Quite different, mutually incompatible conceptions of the nature of objects and of reference find representation within it. Some conceptions yield classical first-order logic; some yield weaker logics. Yet others yie...

Richard Rorty lists Martin Heidegger among the three greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Dewey.Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). Even those who would propose a very different list would agree that Heidegger has been among the most...

Aristotle (384–322 BC), the founder of the discipline of logic, also founded the study of quantification. Normally, Aristotle begins a topic by reviewing the common opinions, including the opinions of his chief predecessors. In logic, however, he could not adopt the same strategy; before him, he reports, "there was nothing at all" (Sophistical Refu...

Contemporary students of logic tend to think of the logic of the connectives as the most basic area of the subject, which can then be extended with a logic of quantifiers. Historically, however, the logic of the quantifiers, in the form of the Aristotelian theory of the syllogism, came first. Truth conditions for negation, conjunction, and disjunct...

This chapter discusses two versions of the doctrine of analogical predication. One rests on the idea of structural similarity. An analogy between a representation and what it represents can legitimately be drawn. Properties of the representation provide grounds for inferring corresponding properties of what it represents. This is an aspect of a mor...

This chapter defends the argument from miracles, an argument for God's existence that is primarily historical. It does not depend on any particular definition or description of God. It yields, if successful, de re knowledge of God. And it expresses an important reason why many believers believe in God. The chapter casts the argument in a general fo...

Advances in genomic science create both opportunities and challenges for future generations. Both adolescents and adults may benefit or be harmed by decisions they make in response to this new science. Using a qualitative descriptive design, the authors interviewed 22 adolescents (11 who were aged 14-17 years and 11 who were 18-21 years) and 11 par...

Lennart Aqvist (1984) explains why most contemporary deontic logics use a primitive binary conditional obligation operator. He then points to an account of prima facie obligation as the primary outstanding problem facing these logics. Solving that problem, I hope to show, also solves the puzzles that motivated such theories in the first place. The...

Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without co...

air Macintyre entitled a recent book on ethics and political theory, ose Justice? Which Rationality? Those questions ought to be asked of teaching in contemporary philosophy courses. Courses on ethics and contemporary moral problems are popular throughout the country, focusing on, among other things, justice. Logic courses, if not quite so popular,...

I investigate substitutional interpretations of quantifiers that count existential sentences true just in case they have true instances in a parametric extension of the language. I devise a semantics meeting four criteria: (1) it accounts adequately for natural language quantification; (2) it provides an account of justification in abstract science...