I am a Visiting Associate Research Professor in the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame. From 2016-2025 I was a philosophy professor at Seattle Pacific University, and before that a postdoctoral research fellow at Notre Dame, and at the University of Oxford. I did my Ph.D. in Philosophy at Rutgers University.
My primary areas of research are Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, and Philosophy of Religion, and increasingly on issues in Ethics. Recent work has explored knowing others in relationship, goodness, honesty, lying, communicative responsibility, and emotions like hope. Related and earlier topics include assertion, hedging, predictions, fallibilism, defeat, knowledge norms, and the epistemology of religion. This year I’ve written new papers on prayer, divine hiddenness, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. My research has been supported by recent grants on knowledge and God, and on the philosophy of honesty through the Honesty Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Here are my Google Scholar page and PhilPeople profile.
I am also PhilPapers editor for the categories Defeat, Primitivism about Knowledge, Norms of Assertion, and Epistemology of Religion.
You can reach me at: mbenton at nd dot edu