Paul K. Moser is an American analytic philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. He is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 at Loyola University Chicago and editor of American Philosophical Quarterly. He is the author of many works in epistemology and the philosophy of religion, in which he has supported versions of epistemic foundationalism and volitional theism

Theism

Theism, in the broadest sense, is the belief that at least one deity exists.In a more specific sense, theism refers to a doctrine concerning the nature of a monotheistic God and God's relationship to the universe....

. His latest work brings these two positions together to support volitional evidentialism about theistic belief, in contrast to fideism and traditional natural theology. His work draws from some epistemological and theological insights of Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...

, John Oman, and H. H. Farmer, but adds (i) a notion of purposively available evidence of God’s existence, (ii) a notion of authoritative evidence in contrast with spectator evidence, and (iii) a notion of personifying evidence of God whereby some willing humans become salient evidence of God's existence.

Authored books

• The Severity of God: Rigor and Lenience in Religion

Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2013

• The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Reexamined

Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. isbn: 978-0-521-73628-2

• The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology

Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press

Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...

, 2008. 304 pages. isbn: 978-0-521-88903-2

Winner of the 2011 Alpha Sigma Nu (Honor Society of Jesuit Colleges and Universities) Book Award for Philosophy

• The Theory of Knowledge: A Thematic Introduction (with D.H. Mulder and J.D. Trout)

New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 212 pages. Translated by Marcelo Brandao Cipolla as A Teoria Do Conhecimentio: Uma Introducao Tematica. Sao Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004. 233 pages.

• Philosophy After Objectivity

New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...

, 1993. 267 pages. Paperback edition, 1999. Electronic version published in NetLibrary, 2002.

• Knowledge and Evidence

Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy Series (Series Editor: Sydney Shoemaker). 285 pages. Paperback edition, 1991.

• Empirical Justification

Boston/Dordrecht: D. Reidel

D. Reidel

D. Reidel was an academic publishing company based in Dordrecht. It joined with Kluwer in the 1990s as Kluwer/Reidel, together being purchased by Cinven and Candover in 2003. Cinven and Candover also purchased Springer, merging the operations of all the publishers into one conglomerate, Springer...

(Kluwer/Springer) Publishing Company, 1985. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, Vol. 34 (Series Editors: Keith Lehrer and Wilfrid Sellars). 263 pages. Published also in Reidel's Pallas Paperback Series, 1985.

Edited books

• Jesus and Philosophy: New Essays. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. (An anthology of ten previously unpublished essays on what Jesus has to do with philosophy.)
• The Rationality of Theism (with Paul Copan). London/New York: Routledge Ltd., 2003. (A 292-page anthology of previously unpublished essays by thirteen authors on evidence for Christian theism.)
• Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (with Daniel Howard-Snyder). Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. (A 242-page anthology of previously unpublished essays by eleven authors on the idea of a God who hides.)
• Oxford Handbook of Epistemology. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (A 595-page anthology of previously unpublished essays by nineteen authors, in the series Oxford Handbooks of Philosophy, a series of which Paul Moser is the General Editor.) Also in Oxford Scholarship Online, 2004.
• Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches (with A. vander Nat). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, 1995, 2002.  (A 582-page anthology with a 28-page general introduction and five section introductions and bibliographies; second edition, 1995; third edition, 2002.)
• Moral Relativism (with T.L. Carson). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. (A 337-page anthology on contemporary ethical relativism, with a 21-page general introduction and a 6-page topical bibliography.)
• Morality and the Good Life (with T.L. Carson). New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. (A 522-page anthology on contemporary ethical theory, with a 22-page general introduction and a 16-page topical bibliography.)
• Empirical Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology   Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 1986, 1996. (A 468-page anthology with a 34-page general introduction and a 17-page topical bibliography; Second Edition, 1996.)
• Contemporary Materialism (with J.D. Trout). London/New York: Routledge Ltd., 1995. (A 378-page anthology with a 32-page general introduction and a topical bibliography.)
• Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy (with D.H. Mulder). New York/Toronto: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993. (A 488-page anthology on metaphilosophy, with a 13-page general introduction, four section introductions, and a 15-page topical bibliography; now distributed by Prentice-Hall, Inc.)
• Reality In Focus: Contemporary Readings on Metaphysics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., A Division of Simon & Schuster, Publishers, 1990. (A 456-page anthology with an 11-page general introduction and five section introductions and bibliographies.)
• Rationality In Action: Contemporary Approaches. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. (A 493-page anthology with a 10-page general introduction, three section introductions, and a topical bibliography.)
• A Priori Knowledge. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Oxford Readings in Philosophy Series. (A 222-page anthology with a 14-page general introduction and a 10-page bibliography.)