Kenneth L. Pearce

Kenneth L. Pearce is an American analytic philosopher of religion and metaphysician. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Southern California (2014) and held an assistant/associate professorship in philosophy at Trinity College Dublin before moving to the University of St Andrews, where he holds a chair in philosophy of religion. His research focuses on early modern philosophy—particularly George Berkeley's idealism—and on contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, including theistic arguments, divine attributes, and religious epistemology. His monograph Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World (Oxford, 2017) reconstructs Berkeley's metaphysics as a semantic theory in which the natural world is structured by divine language. With Tyron Goldschmidt he co-edited Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics (Oxford, 2017). Pearce is best known in philosophy-of-religion circles for Is There a God? A Debate (Routledge, 2021), co-authored with Graham Oppy, in which he defends theism against Oppy's naturalism, drawing on contingency-based cosmological reasoning and an ultimate-explanation framework. He has published widely in journals including Mind, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Faith and Philosophy, and Religious Studies. His approach favors rigorous analytic argument over apologetic rhetoric, situating theistic claims within debates about explanation, modality, and the foundations of metaphysics. Critics, including Oppy, contend that his contingency arguments rely on contestable principles of sufficient reason.