H. E. Baber

Sabellianism, the doctrine that the Persons of the Trinity are roles that a single divine being plays either simultaneously or successively, is commonly thought to entail that the Father is the Son. I argue that there is at least one version of Sabellianism that does not have this result and meets the requirements for a minimally decent doctrine of the Trinity insofar as it affirms that each Person of the Trinity is God and that the Trinity of Persons is God while maintaining monotheism without undermining the distinctness of Persons

There appear to be at least two important disanalogies between the situation of women and that of racial and ethnic minorities whose members are generally regarded as paradigmatic victims of oppression. First, in the case of oppressed racial and ethnic minorities it is relatively easy to identify the oppressors and the policies which serve to keep the oppressed in their place; it is not so easy to determine who the oppressors of women are--surely men are not universally blameworthy--nor even to ascertain which policies are oppressive. Secondly, unlike most members of disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities, many women seem actively to support the very policies and institutions which contribute to their oppression.

André Gallois argues that individuals that undergo fission are on some occasions identical, but on others distinct. Occasional identity however, is metaphysically costly. I argue that we can get all the benefits of occasional identity without the metaphysical costs. On the proposed account, the names of ordinary material objects refer indeterminately to stages that belong to reference classes determined by the context of utterance or temporal adverbs. In addition, temporal markers indicating the perspective from which we count objects and assign properties to them determine how many count and what is true of them. So, as Gallois holds, the truth value of claims about what is true at a time may change over time and, where fission or fusion occur, does change. The current account, however, secures this result without commitment to occasional identity: reference, predication and counting are “occasional”; identity is not

This chapter discusses desire theory and how the temporal gap between desires and the states of affairs that satisfy them affects this theory. Satisfaction is not that important in desire theory because even if getting what we want fails to satisfy, we are better off for having got it. The rationale for rejecting hedonistic accounts of well-being in favor of desire theories is the intuition that states of affairs that are not “like” anything for us can harm and benefit us. Sumner, however, suggests that even if we grant the desire theorist’s fundamental assumption that they can make a difference to our well-being, the prospective character of desire, which opens a temporal gap between desires and the states of affairs that satisfy them, undermines the account.

Even in the absence of overt discrimination, women are often channelled into different directions from their male counterparts by the network of incentives and disincentives which constitute what has been called a ‘discriminatory environment’. On the account of freedom and coercion developed in this essay, the incentives and disincentives which typically figure in discriminatory environments are not coercive. Nevertheless such environments, it is argued, are morally objectionable on independent grounds.

Traditional hardcopy publishing brought about a division of labor between producers and disseminators of information. Online publishing makes it feasible for authors to disseminate their work much more widely without any investment in equipment beyond the ubiquitous laptop, without labor costs and without any special technical expertise. As a consequence, the division of labor is no longer important and is, in a range of cases, inefficient. For some scholarly works and teaching materials in particular, traditional hardcopy publishing rather than rather than facilitating the dissemination of creative works not only restricts access to these materials but also undermines their production. Arguably, hardcopy journals and textbook anthologies, are inefficient and only persist because of institutional inertia and what has become the vicious circle of academic publishing.

Diachronic identity is understood as an identity holding between something existing at one time and something existing at another time. On the stage view, however, ordinary objects are instantaneous stages that do not exist at other times so diachronic identity is, at best, problematic. On account proposed here a name does not, as Sider and others suggest, denote a stage concurrent with its utterance. Rather, at any time, t, a name of an ordinary object designates a stage-at-t as its primary referent and refers indeterminately over it and all and only those stages counterpart-related to it—its reference class at t. At any time, t, a at t1 is the same object as b at t2 iff for every stage x counterpart-related to a’s stage-at t and every stage y counterpart-related to b’s stage-at-t, x=y. Diachronic identity statements, therefore, assert strict identities—between concurrent stages. Ordinarily names select the same reference classes at every time so, in ordinary cases, identity statements are not ‘occasional’. In fission cases names select different reference classes at different times. Where a becomes b and c, at any pre-fission time ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ have same the primary referent and so select the same reference class—therefore, before fission b is the same object as c. At any post-fission time ‘b’ and ‘c’ select different reference classes—so after fission b is not the same object as c. Identity is not occasional but, in extraordinary cases, identity statements are—because reference is.

Modal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s possibly being F with its having a counterpart that is F at another possible world; temporal counterpart theory, the stage view, according to which people and other ordinary objects are instantaneous stages, identifies a thing’s having been F or going to be F, with its having a counterpart that is F at another time. Both counterpart theories invite what has been called ‘the argument from concern’ (Rosen, G. 1990. “Modal Fictionalism.” Mind 99 (395): 327–54). Why should I be concerned about my counterparts at other possible worlds or other times? I care about how things might have gone for me—not how they go for other people at other possible worlds; I care about my prospects—not the way go for other people at other times. Jiri Benovsky has argued that while modal counterpart theory can be defended against this style of argument, temporal counterpart theory cannot (Benovsky, J. 2015. “Alethic Modalities, Temporal Modalities, and Representation.” Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 29: 18–34). I argue that temporal counterpart theory, like modal counterpart theory, resists the argument from concern.

Modal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s possibly being F with its having a counterpart that is F at another possible world; temporal counterpart theory identifies a thing’s having been F or going to be F, with its having a counterpart that is F at another time. Benovsky, J. 2015. “Alethic Modalities, Temporal Modalities, and Representation.” Kriterion: Journal of Philosophy 29: 18–34 in this journal endorses modal counterpart theory but holds that temporal counterpart theory is untenable because it does not license the ascription of the intuitively correct temporal properties to ordinary objects, and hence that we should understand ordinary objects, including persons, as transtemporal ‘worms’. I argue that the worm theory is problematic when it comes to accounting for what matters in survival and that temporal counterpart theory provides a plausible account of personal persistence.

According to many orthodox Christian theologies Jesus is not merely sinless but impeccable: he not only did not sin but could not. This is puzzling because one can only sin by doing something else and, prima face, Jesus can do actions that you or I could do by which we would sin. I suggest that appearances to the contrary, Jesus cannot do a variety of actions that a merely human duplicate could do. His doing sinful actions is compossible with a range of empirical facts about his physical abilities and circumstances of the sort we ordinarily take into account in assessing what a person can do, but not with a wider range of theological facts concerning his divinity. Like Tim, Lewis’s time-traveler, who can kill Grandfather relative to facts about his immediate circumstances and abilities but not relative to a wider range of facts, Jesus ‘can’ in the ordinary sense sin, though he will not, but relative to a wider range of facts which obtain in virtue of his divinity, cannot.

Dion is a human person, Lefty is his left foot, and Theon is Lefty-Complement, a proper part of Dion. Lefty is annihilated and Dion survives left-footless. After Lefty’s annihilation Theon, if he survives, occupies the same region as Dion. I suggest that this scenario be understood as a fusion case in which Dion and Theon, initially overlapping but distinct, are identical after Lefty’s annihilation and propose an account of proper names that allows us to say that Dion and Theon have ‘become identical’ without commitment to occasional identity or other controversial metaphysical doctrines. The proposed solution employs the semantics developed by Wolfgang Schwarz to address the ‘paradox of occasional identity’, posed by puzzle cases of fission, to deal with the problem of Dion and Theon, a body-minus puzzle.

Can a materialist look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come? Dean Zimmerman’s Falling Elevator Model is a speculative account of how persons, understood as material beings, might survive in a post-mortem resurrected state—a just-so story. It assumes endurantism, the doctrine that persons and other ordinary objects are three-dimensional beings which are wholly present at every time they exist. I argue that neither endurantism, nor purdurantism, according to which persons are four-dimensional ‘worms’ who have proper temporal parts at every time that they exist, provides a plausible account of personal survival. If you want to be a Christian materialist you should embrace exdurantism, the ‘stage theory’, according which persons are instantaneous stages and are not identical to their temporal successors either in this world or in any world to come. Exdurantism provides a plausible account of survival in ordinary cases and extraordinary cases of this-worldly fission, and of post-mortem survival.