Sandra Menssen

Sandra Menssen is an American philosopher at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), where she has taught philosophy with a focus on philosophy of religion, epistemology, and ethics. Together with her colleague Thomas D. Sullivan, she has developed a distinctive program in philosophical theology that challenges the standard division of labor between natural theology and revealed theology. Their joint monograph, The Agnostic Inquirer (2007), argues that an open-minded inquirer into the existence of God should not bracket the content of putative revelations but should treat such content as part of the relevant evidence. The book contends that examining the substantive claims of candidate revelations can raise the probability of theism itself, reversing the usual order in which one first establishes God's existence and only then assesses revelation. Menssen and Sullivan engage with Bayesian and cumulative-case approaches in analytic philosophy of religion, situating their work alongside that of Richard Swinburne while differing on methodological priorities. Critics within analytic philosophy of religion have questioned whether their reversal of the evidential order avoids circularity or smuggles in theistic assumptions. Menssen has also written on the metaphysics of substance and on professional ethics. Her work is associated with a Catholic philosophical milieu though her arguments are pitched in broadly analytic terms accessible across confessional lines.