After starting this journey by returning to study for a BD in 2006, MA in 2012 and then the PhD at the end of 2017, I finally graduated as Dr Macneil this week! My thesis is about what makes philosophy Christian rather than just philosophy being done by people who happen to be Christian. That is, what would be distinctive about Christian philosophy?

This I called “epistemological self-consciousness” which can be summarised in three words “atheism assumes theism” but took me around 140000 words to unpack (40000 of those are footnotes!). The thesis is the exposition of that three word transcendental argument and asserts we can only be truly rational (or reasonable in the sense of living according to reason) when we assume the Christian conception of reality and its relations.

Wipf & Stock Publishers will be publishing an enhanced book form which includes an additional chapter on political philosophy which the examiners had asked me to remove it as although “interesting it did not enhance the thesis.”  Of course, I disagree with that (though with the greatest respect) which is why I added it back in – in my view, putting the thesis into practice completes and validates the thesis. There is a book draft (further changes are likely!!) here. The thesis itself, useful for those that love extended footnotes and cross-references for study, is here.  I will also be creating a study-friendly academic web-version (though the PDF is structured and hyperlinked), and am working now on a video series to accompany the book, you can find post for individual episodes listed below and can also find them on my YouTube channel, on Vimeo, Rumble, Instagram, Twitter/X and at my Facebook Author page.  You can even subscribe to an RSS feed using the URL https://vimeo.com/channels/epistemologicalself/videos/rss/ (you can add RSS feeds to any RSS reader and some mail clients like Microsoft Outlook) so that you can receive any new video posts to your Inbox.

Why Study Philosophy?

The drafts and thesis are made available under the CC BY-SA license terms. Please be honorable and respect this license, I want this work to be freely available and derivative works likewise until the official versions are published.