About me
My name is Billy Dunaway. I am currently Department Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; before that I was a postdoc at the University of Oxford, and before that I received my PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I work in the areas of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.
I was the Book Reviews Editor at Ethics from 2018-2022. The new reviews editors are Alex King and Daniel Wodak.
I was co-PI with Jon McGinnis on the Theology, Science, and Knowledge project, a 2.5 year, 1.1 million dollar project funded by the John Templeton Foundation and UMSL from 2018-2021. An archive of the project website, with outputs, media, and past events, can be found at the Theology, Science, and Knowledge website.
In my spare time I rugby for the St. Louis Hornets. If you are in St. Louis, new players are welcome.
I can be contacted at billy [at] williamdunaway [dot] com. Comments on anything posted here are very welcome.
Photo by August Jennewein/courtesy UMSL.
Books
Reality and Morality, Oxford University Press (2020). (OUP link).
Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard, co-edited with David Plunkett. Maize Books, an imprint of Michigan Publishing (2022, open access).
Publications
Necessary Existent Theology (with Rosabel Ansari and Jon McGinnis), forthcoming in Religious Studies.
The Epistemology of Theological Predication, Essays in Philosophy (2022, open access).
The Metaphysical Conception of Realism, in Meaning, Decision, and Norms: Themes from the Work of Allan Gibbard (2022, open access).
Realism, Meta-semantics, and Risk, in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy (2021, open access).
Knowledge and Theological Predication: Lessons from the Medieval Islamic Tradition (with Jon McGinnis), in Res Philosophica (2021).
Epistemological Motivations for Anti-realism, in Philosophical Studies (2018).
Duns Scotus's Epistemic Argument against Divine Illumination, in Matthew A Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz (eds.) Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Luck: Evolutionary and Epistemic, in Episteme (2017).
Ethical Vagueness and Practical Reasoning, in The Philosophical Quarterly (2017).
Scepticism (with John Hawthorne), in William J. Abraham and Frederick D. Aquino (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology and Theology (2017).
Realism and Objectivity, in David Plunkett and Tristram McPherson (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics (2017).
Reference Magnetism as a Solution to the Moral Twin Earth Problem (with Tristram McPherson), in Ergo, open access (2016).
Expressivism and Normative Metaphysics, in Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol. 11, (2016).
Supervenience Arguments and Normative Non-naturalism, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2015).
Whither Anankastics? (with Alex Silk), in Philosophical Perspectives 28: Ethics (2014).
Modal Quantification without Worlds, in Karen Bennett and Dean Zimmerman (eds.) Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, vol. 8 (2013). Also one of four finalists for the 2011 Younger Scholars Prize for Metaphysics.
The Folk Probably Do Think What You Think They Think (with Anna Edmonds and David Manley), in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (2013).
Minimalist Semantics in Meta-ethical Expressivism, in Philosophical Studies (2010).
Book Reviews
Review of Thomas Hofweber, Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, in The Philosophical Review (2018).
Review of Matthew Chrisman, The Meaning of 'Ought', Oxford University Press, in The Journal of Philosophy (2017).
More papers
Testimony and Interpretation (with Matthew Benton)
The Prospects for Normative Metaphysics: Analyticity with Substantive Truth
De Dicto Concern in Cases of Ethical Vagueness
Perfectly Natural Relative Naturalness