Michael Rea

We lay out the fatalist’s argument, making sure to clarify which dialectical moves are available to the libertarian. We then offer a more robust presentation of Ockhamism, responding to obvious objections and teasing out the implications of the view. At this point, we discuss presentism and eternalism in more detail. We then present our argument for the claim that the libertarian cannot take Ockham’s way out of the fatalism argument unless she rejects presentism. Finally, we consider and dispense with objections to our argument. In the end, it ought to be clear that the libertarian must make a choice between Ockham’s way out and presentism.

Co-location is compatible with the doctrine of microphysical supervenience. Microphysical supervenience involves intrinsic qualitative properties that supervene on microphysical structures. Two different objects, such as Socrates and the lump of tissue of which he is constituted, can be co-located objects that supervene on different sets of properties. Some of the properties are shared, but others, such as the human-determining properties or the lump-determining properties, supervene only on one object or the other. Therefore, properties at the same location can be arranged so as to constitute more than one object at the same time.

Philosophy of religion comprises philosophical reflection on a wide range of religious and religiously significant phenomena: religious belief, doctrine and practice in general; the phenomenology and cognitive significance of religious experience; the authority and reliability of religious testimony; the significance of religious diversity and disagreement; the relationship between religion (or God, or the gods) and morality; the doctrines, practices and modes of cognition distinctive to particular religious traditions; and so on. It is as old as philosophy itself and has been a standard part of Western philosophy in every period (see Religion, history of philosophy of). Since the latter half of the twentieth century, there has been a great growth of interest in it, and the range of topics that philosophers of religion have considered has expanded considerably.

Over the past sixty years, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, there has been a significant revival of interest in the philosophy of religion. More recently, philosophers of religion have turned in a more self-consciously interdisciplinary direction, with special focus on topics that have traditionally been the provenance of systematic theologians in the Christian tradition. The present volumes Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology, volumes 1 and 2 aim to bring together some of the most important essays on six central topics in recent philosophical theology. Volume 1 collects essays on three distinctively Christian doctrines: trinity, incarnation, and atonement. Volume 2 focuses on three topics that arise in all of the major theistic religions: providence, resurrection, and scripture.

This paper defends Mereological Universalism(the thesis that, for any set S of disjoint objects, there is an object that the members of S compose. Universalism is unpalatable to many philosophers because it entails that if there are such things as my left tennis shoe, W. V. Quine, and the Taj Mahal, then there is another object that those three things compose. This paper presents and criticizes Peter van Inwagen's argument against Universalism and then presents a new argument in favor of Universalism. It turns out that the most reasonable way to resist the argument for Universalism is to deny the existence of artifacts; thus, if we believe in artifacts, we have no real choice other than to embrace Universalism.

Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were married on July 29, 2000 and divorced on October 2, 2005. If I correctly understand the position defended in Thomas Sattig’s The Language and Reality of Time, this fact implies that every instantaneous region of space occupied by Brad between those dates is married to some instantaneous region occupied by Jen. Yes, the regions are married, and they are distinct from Brad and Jen. Moreover, some of them are cheating on the regions to which they are married. To their discredit, they are having affairs with regions occupied by Angelina Jolie. (Shame on those regions.)

There are five individually plausible and jointly incompatible assumptions underlying four familiar puzzles about material constitution. The problem of material constitution just is the fact that these five assumptions are both plausible and incompatible. I will begin by providing a very general statement of the problem. I will present the five assumptions and provide a short argument showing how they conflict with one another. Then, in subsequent sections, I will go on to show how these assumptions underlie each of the four puzzles. I will conclude by providing an exhaustive taxonomy of possible solutions to the problem.

The doctrine of the Trinity maintains that there are exactly three divine Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) but only one God. The philosophical problem raised by this doctrine is well known. On the one hand, the doctrine seems clearly to imply that the divine Persons are numerically distinct. How else could they be ’three’ rather than one? On the other hand, it seems to imply that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are identical. If each Person is divine, how else could there be exactly ’one’ God? But the divine Persons can’t be both distinct and identical. Thus, the doctrine appears to be incoherent. Some try to solve this problem by appeal to the view that identity is sortal-relative. In this paper, I argue that this strategy is unsuccessful as a stand-alone solution to the problem of the Trinity.