Steven Merle Duncan

Hume was correct in his critique of causation as understood by the New Science, a critique deadly to both causal and scientific realism. Getting beyond Hume's critique of causation requires that we call into question the New Science's understanding of causation and replace it with a Neo-Aristotelian account of causal processes. In this paper, I try to point the way to such an account.

An Address delivered to the Seattle G. K. Chesterton Society at the University of Washington Newman Center, May 2, 2013.

After discussing the manifest inconveniences of Galilean physicalism for both science and common sense, I propose an alternate, Aristotelian ontology of material things and show how it solves the epistemological problems engendered by the New Science. Read at the annual POH Symposium in Lake Wenatchee, WA, May 2011.

Do skeptical arguments undermine reason, as Hume supposes? In this paper, I argue that they do not and that skepticism is thus no threat to dogmatism about the possibility of knowledge.

This is the third in a series of papers on material modality, which explores the concept of a materially necessary being and argues that such a being exists.

In his Beweisgrund (1762), Kant presents a sketch of "the only possible basis" for a proof of God's existence. In this essay, I attempt to present that proof as a valid and sound argument for the existence of God.

In this paper, I explore the concept of happiness by relating it to those of desire, pleasure, and love, arriving at the classical view that objective happiness consists in the possession and enjoyment of the good.

In the course of writing a book on Free Will, I took the opportunity to read a good deal of contemporary literature on the Free Will problem. This paper is a survey and reflection on that reading, responding to the current trends and state of play concerning the existence of free will.

In this essay, I investigate the implications for the discussion of theism in philosophy of religion for the beliefs of ordinary Christians and conclude that, in light of its historical development, those implications are minimal.

In this paper I defend the thesis that, considered simply as certain sorts of bodily sensations, pleasure is not the good nor is pain intrinsically evil. In fact, the opposite is largely the case: pursuit of pleasure is generally productive of ontic evil, and pain, when heeded, directs us toward the ontic good.

Although this piece was inspired by the kinds of legal puzzles discussed by Hart and Honore in Causation in the Law, the puzzle cases presented here are intended to test the reader's intuitions about what constitutes murder. Play along!

In this paper, I argue that neuroscience not only is not complemented, but rather is positively undermined, by the substantive commitments of materialist philosophers of mind. Thus, we can have neuroscience or "neurophilosophy" but not both. Since neuroscience is a real science, to the extent that it is in tension with materialistic neurophilosophy, the latter should be abandoned and the former retained.

Aquinas' Third Way is often dismissed as a howler, because he infers from the fact that, since the universe is metaphysically contingent that there was some time in the past when it didn't exist. I offer an argument to justify this inference.

Based on a recently published essay by Jeremy Gwiazda, I argue that the possibility that the present state of the universe is the product of an actually infinite series of causally-ordered prior events is impossible in principle, and thus that a major criticism of the Secunda Via of St. Thomas is baseless after all.

This is the final paper in the Possibilities that Matter series and attempts to complete the project of constructing a material interpretation of modal logic.

In this essay I explore some of the basic elements of consciousness from a substance dualist point of view, incorporating some elements of Kant's Transcendental Analytic into an overall account of the constitution of consciousness.

In this paper I argue that there is no problem of Divine Hiddenness for Christians and offer an alternate explanation for the widespread claim that God's existence is hidden based on the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.