A Response to G. Scott Davis

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez.     

In Defense of Indexicalism:Comments on Davis

Wayne Davis (2004) argues against the thesis that knowledge claims are indexical, and he presents an alternative account of the contextual variability of our use of S knows p. In this commentary I focus on the following three points. First, I want to supplement Daviss considerations about the inability of indexicalism to deal with skeptical paradoxes by considering what the consequence would be if the indexicalists explanation of these paradoxes were satisfactory. Second, I am going to take a brief look at Daviss alternative theory. Third, in the main part of my commentary I try to show that indexicalism may be true in spite of the linguistic evidence Davis presents against it.     

Anselm and Rowe: A reply to Davis

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Michael Davis: 2006 award for distinguished scientific contributions

Presents the citation for Michael Davis, who received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions "for his major discoveries about the brain circuits underlying basic aspects of behavioral plasticity and learning." A brief profile and a selected bibliography, as well as Davis' award address, entitled Neural Systems Involved in Fear and Anxiety Measured With Fear-Potentiated Startle, accompany the citation. ((c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).