In this article I challenge Kantian constructivism both as an interpretation of Kant's own philosophical commitments and on its own merits as a moral theory, and argue in favour of a moral realist interpretation of Kant. I do so by focusing on Kant's own religious views and the question of whether a Kantian moral theory can be religiously neutral. I show that constructivist readings have severe problems on both fronts, while realist readings of Kant do not. This provides strong evidence that realist forms of Kantian ethics are preferable both as readings of Kant and as approaches to moral theory.

In this article, I argue that recent work in analytic philosophy on the semantics of names and the metaphysics of persistence supports two theses in Buddhist philosophy, namely the impermanence of objects and a corollary about how referential language works. According to this latter package of views, the various parts of what we call one object (say, King Milinda) possess no unity in and of themselves. Unity comes rather from language, in that we have terms (say, ‘King Milinda’) which stand for all the parts taken together. Objects are mind- (or rather language-)generated fictions. I think this package can be cashed out in terms of two central contemporary views. The first is that there are temporal parts: just as an object is spatially extended by having spatial parts at different spatial locations, so it is temporally extended by having temporal parts at different temporal locations. The second is that names are predicates: rather than standing for any one thing, a name stands for a range of things. The natural language term ‘Milinda’ is not akin to a logical constant, but akin to a predicate.

Putting this together, I'll argue that names are predicates with temporal parts in their extension, which parts have no unity apart from falling under the same predicate. ‘Milinda’ is a predicate which has in its extension all Milinda's parts. The result is an interesting and original synthesis of plausible positions in semantics and metaphysics, which makes good sense of a central Buddhist doctrine.

Some philosophers take the ascetic sage as a test case for the plausibility of theories of welfare. They maintain that attitudinal hedonism entails that the sage lives the good life, since he enjoys meditation, solitude, peace and quiet, and so on. Some of the longest-enduring traditions of asceticism, however, deny that the sage takes attitudinal pleasure in these kinds of things. A group of Upaniṣads aptly named the Saṃnyāsa, or Ascetic Upaniṣads, for example, explicitly states that the sage neither enjoys nor despairs in earthly states of affairs. The attitudinal hedonist might argue that the sage of the Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads lives the good life nonetheless, since he takes immense and constant pleasure in the ātman– the eternal, immaterial self. The sage's immense and constant pleasure in the ātman, however, also commits the attitudinal hedonist to the stronger claim that the ascetic lives the best life possible. The sage's life seems less than optimal, however, because he enjoys only one thing to the exclusion of all other things.

Some critics of the doctrine of penal substitution have alleged that the doctrine is incoherent because punishment entails an attitude of condemnation or censure towards the person punished, which is impossible in the case of Christ. It is shown that this objection is multiply flawed and that a number of viable ways of avoiding the alleged incoherence are available to the penal substitution theorist.

This article advances a non-doxastic account of saving faith that nevertheless emphasizes the connection between faith and belief. I argue that saving faith epistemically justifies some religious beliefs. I offer an account that is meant to show how faith can play a variety of significant roles it is often purported to play, that is, how a specific virtue of faith can secure salvation, epistemically justify theistic belief, practically justify religious ways of life, and belong to practitioners of different religions. The account also provides an alternative to evidentialist, fideist, and Reformed Epistemology approaches to faith and reason.

This article is a response to Stephen Law's article ‘The evil-god challenge’. In his article, Law argues that if belief in evil-god is unreasonable, then belief in good-god is unreasonable; that the antecedent is true; and hence so is the consequent. In this article, I show that Law's affirmation of the antecedent is predicated on the problem of good (i.e. the problem of whether an all-evil, all-powerful, and all-knowing God would allow there to be as much good in the world as there is), and argue that the problem of good fails. Thus, the antecedent is unmotivated, which renders the consequent unmotivated. Law's challenge for good-god theists is to show that good-god theism is not rendered unreasonable by the problem of evil in the same way that evil-god theism is rendered unreasonable by the problem of good. Insofar as the problem of good does not render belief in evil-god unreasonable, Law's challenge has been answered: since it is not unreasonable to believe in evil-god (at least for the reasons that Law gives) it is not unreasonable to believe in good-god. Finally, I show that – my criticism aside – the evil-god challenge turns out to be more complicated and controversial than it initially appears, for it relies on the (previously unacknowledged) contentious assumption that sceptical theism is false.

This brief introduction outlines the main themes and arguments of Roman Faith and Christian Faith.

This article offers a classicist's perspective on Teresa Morgan's book Roman Faith and Christian Faith.

In conversation with Morgan (2015), I point out that the view of relational faith I have elsewhere defended (McKaughan 2013, 2016, 2017) fits rather well with the understanding of pistis that emerges from Morgan's careful reading of New Testament texts. Moreover, the fact that New Testament authors display little interest in examining interior aspects of faith makes it difficult to justify the claim that their understanding of the pistis lexicon requires believing in the modern sense as the attitude Christians must take towards relevant content, in contrast to various other positive but non-doxastic attitudes that philosophers recognize today. Such faith is of contemporary interest, given its congruity with early Christian tradition, the role it can play in helping relationships to persevere through various kinds of challenges (including doubts significant enough to preclude believing), and for the wide range of evidential circumstances in which it can be enacted with intellectual integrity.

In my contribution to the symposium on Teresa Morgan's Roman Faith and Christian Faith, I set the stage for three questions. First, in the Graeco-Roman view, when you put/maintain faith in someone, is the cognitive aspect of your faith compatible with scepticism about the relevant propositions? Second, did some of the New Testament authors think that one could put/maintain faith in God while being sceptical about the relevant propositions? Third, in her private writings, Saint Teresa of Calcutta described herself as living by faith and yet not believing; even so, by all appearances, she was an exemplar of faith in God. Would people during the period of your study tend to see her as an exemplar of faith in God?

Responding to key questions raised by the other three, this article discusses the factors which led to the development of Christian fideism and why Christians were seen as a threat to wider society. It considers whether early Christian discourses always represent (of characters in narratives), or demand, belief alongside trust and other relational aspects of pistis, and argues that it is sometimes possible to have effective pistis without having right beliefs. It discusses the variable relationship between belief and doubt in New Testament texts, and suggests how the faith of St Teresa of Calcutta might have been viewed by early Christians.