Daniel Molto

Biographic Data

ID976386
NAMEDaniel Molto
GIVEN NAMESDaniel
FAMILY NAMEMolto
SIGNATUREMOLTO D
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Sussex
ORCID0000-0002-2384-1668
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS4
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2017
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX2

  • A New Way to Make Sense of Copredication

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEErkenntnis2026

    This paper offers a new account of polysemy, which can explain the intuitions that utterances of copredicative sentences like ‘lunch was delicious, but went on forever’ involve polysemous terms, that they are true in some contexts, and that the truth of such utterances depends on the extensions of the component parts of the sentence. The goal of the paper is to show that we need not make a choice between truth-conditional semantics and acknowledg…

  • Sterba on Divine Commands and Fairness

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEReligions2026References: 10

    James Sterba has recently argued against Divine Command Theory (DCT). Sterba also offers, as a preferable alternative to DCT, a metaethical account which he has developed over a number of years (culminating in Sterba’s 2013 book), which attempts to ground ethics in rationality. Both his case against DCT and his alternative metaethical theory are worth considering, but in this paper I will argue that both fail. This is not of course to say that DC…

  • An Externalist and Contextualist Account of Copredication

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLECritica2025

    I maintain that polysemy is a contextual phenomenon, but that the nature of the context-dependence of polysemy has been misunderstood, a fact which is brought out by the especially difficult case of copredication. In this paper, I offer a truth-conditional semantics that can accommodate copredicative sentences, in which polysemous terms are being used in more than one sense, and thus have more than one extension simultaneously. I argue, further, …

  • Passional Atheism, Passional Agnosticism and 'The Will to Believe

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEReligions2025References: 9

    Jack Warman and Joshua Cockayne have recently claimed that the arguments that William James provides in his famous lecture 'The Will to Believe' to justify passional theism would equally justify passional atheism. They are correct in this claim, but there is in fact more than one way that a non-theistic doxastic attitude can be passionally justified given what is said in James's lecture. In addition to outright, passionally motivated, atheistic b…

  • Revisiting an argument against identity

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLESynthese2024References: 17

    In this paper, I consider Peter Geach (Rew Metaphys 21:2–12, 1967) infamous argument against the existence of an “absolute” identity relation. One objection to Geach’s argument which has been raised is that Geach claims that no characterization of “absolute” identity is possible, while ignoring the model-theoretic characterization ( : x D). I reconstruct Geach’s likely attitude towards the model-theoretic characterization of identity from Geach’s…

  • A New Defence against the Problem of Evil

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEReligions2024Cited by: 2References: 12

    In this paper, I propose a defence against the problem of evil. This defence does not involve either free will or soul-making, but, rather, is intended as a replacement for the traditional theodicies. The defence will have two components: firstly, a proposal for why a good God would not intervene to eliminate the evil (natural or moral) in the world; and second, a proposal for why a good God would need to allow evil to exist in the world in the f…

  • Human Sovereignty and the Logical Problem of Evil

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEReligions2022Cited by: 2References: 23

    In this paper, I provide a defence of theism against James Sterba's version of the logical problem of evil, at least where the focus is on moral evil (I do not have much to say about natural evil in this paper). After giving my own account of the distinction between the logical and evidential problems of evil, I set out to argue that Sterba fails to prove atheism. The problem lies with this third premise. I think that there is a possible defence …

  • The problem of evil: Unseen animal suffering

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEReligious Studies2021

    On my view, every bone, every fossil, and every putrid whiff of carrion that one smells on a hike in the country is just as good evidence for a divine intervention as it is for the suffering of an animal

  • The mereology of Latin Trinitarianism

    Open AccessDaniel MoltoARTICLEReligious Studies2018

    In this article, I propose a new Latin account of the Trinity, according to which each of the persons of the Trinity is an improper part of the Godhead

  • Non-evidential believing and permissivism about evidence: A reply to Dan-Johan Eklund

    Open AccessJoshua Cockayne, David Efird et al.ARTICLEReligious Studies2017

    In response to John Bishop's (2007) account of passionally caused believing, Dan-Johan Eklund (2014) argues that conscious non-evidential believing is (conceptually) impossible, that is, it's (conceptually) impossible consciously to believe that p whilst acknowledging that the relevant evidence doesn't support p 's being true, for it conflicts with belief being a truth-oriented attitude, or so he argues. In this article, we present Eklund's case …