Dr. Dan Baras
I am a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Bar-Ilan University. I have broad interests, including epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science and philosophy of religion. A significant portion of my past work focused on the idea that certain facts call for explanation. My current research centers on exploring the structure of epistemic normativity. I believe philosophy can help us think clearly about questions that matter to us. I therefore teach and write about climate change ethics, and engage with ideas I believed in my past, when I was religious and training to be a rabbi. The latter is the subject of a recent book of mine titled: Against the Current: Why I Am No Longer Religious.
View CVResearch Projects
Epistemology
Climate Ethics
Metaethics
Philosophy of Religion
Miscellaneous
Book: Calling for Explanation, Oxford University Press, 2022
The assumption that certain facts can’t be mere coincidences—that they call for explanation—underlies influential debates in metaethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. Despite its prevalence and importance as a fundamental assumption in so many debates across fields of study, the premise is rarely questioned, and the distinction between facts that call for explanation and those that do not has thus far received little careful attention. My book aims to fill this gap by both mapping out clearly the theoretical terrain and developing a new way of thinking about the topic.