Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in evolutionary debunking arguments directed against certain types of belief, particularly moral and religious beliefs. According to those arguments, the evolutionary origins of the cognitive mechanisms that produce the targeted beliefs render these beliefs epistemically unjustified. The reason is that natural selection cares for reproduction and survival rather than truth, and false beliefs can in principle be as evolutionarily advantageous as true beliefs. The present volume brings together fourteen essays that examine evolutionary debunking arguments not only in ethics and philosophy of religion, but also in philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The essays move forward research on those arguments by shedding fresh light on old problems and proposing new lines of inquiry. The book will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in the possible skeptical implications of evolutionary theory in any of the above domains.

Diego E. Machuca is an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at CONICET (Argentina). His research is focused on skepticism, both ancient and contemporary. He is the author of Pyrrhonism Past and Present: Inquiry, Disagreement, Self-Knowledge, and Rationality (Springer, 2022). He is also the editor of New Essays on Ancient Pyrrhonism (Brill, 2011), Pyrrhonism in Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy (Springer, 2011), Skepticism and Disagreement (Routledge, 2013), and Moral Skepticism: New Essays (Routledge, 2018), and the co-editor of Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and Les raisons du doute: études sur le scepticisme antique (Classiques Garnier, 2019).