Mylan Engel

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Western Philosophy
21st-century philosophy
Name
Mylan Engel
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School/tradition

Mylan Engel Jr. is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, United States.

He was educated at Vanderbilt University (B.A. 1981) and the University of Arizona (M.A. 1985; Ph.D. 1988). Engel served as an Assistant Professor at Northern Illinois University (1988-1999), Guest Professor at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (1999) and University of Maribor, Slovenia (1999, 2000 and 2002. In 1999 he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University.

Engel's specialties are Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, Animal Ethics, and Environmental Ethics.

Engel is a "moral vegetarian"--that is, he contends we are morally obliged to refrain from eating meat--and has argued that virtually all humans hold beliefs that, if consistently applied, would make them moral vegetarians as well.[1]

He is also a religious skeptic who contends that there are no good reasons for believing in God. He goes on to argue that the absence of positive evidence for God's existence makes atheism (disbelief in God) more defensible than agnosticism (suspension of belief as to whether God exists or not). Here Engel points out that we generally disbelieve in creatures like unicorns--rather than merely suspend belief as to whether unicorns exist--solely on the basis of there being no good reasons to believe in such creatures. Hence, consistency demands we also disbelieve in God upon realizing all reasons put forth for God's existence are unpersuasive.

Professor Engel has been Executive Secretary of The Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals since September, 2002.

[edit] Bibliography

  • "Tierethik, Tierrechte und moralische Integrität". Interdisziplinäre Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik (Hrsg.). Tierrechte - Eine interdisziplinäre Herausforderung. Erlangen 2007. ISBN 978-3-89131-417-3
  • "The Immorality of Eating Meat". Louis P. Pojman (Hrsg.). The Moral Life. New York/Oxford 2000.
  • "Internalism, the Gettier Problem, and Metaepistemological Skepticism", Grazer Philosophische Studien 60 (2000).
  • "The Possibility of Maximal Greatness Examined: A Critique of Plantinga’s Modal Ontological Argument", Acta Analytica 19 (1997).
  • "Coarsening Brand on Events, While Proliferating Davidsonian Events", Grazer Philosophische Studien 47 (1994).
  • "The Problem of Other Minds: A Reliable Solution", Acta Analytica 11 (1993).
  • "Is Epistemic Luck Compatible with Knowledge?", Southern Journal of Philosophy XXX 2 (1992).
  • "Personal and Doxastic Justification in Epistemology", Philosophical Studies 67 (1992).
  • "Russellizing Russell: A Reply to His 'A Critique of Lehrer's Coherentism'", Philosophical Studies 66 (1992).
  • "Inconsistency: The Coherence Theorist's Nemesis", Grazer Philosophische Studien 40 (1991).
  • "Coherentism Reliabilized", Acta Analytica (1986).

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