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4Introduction to Free Will and TheismIn Kevin Timpe & Daniel Speak (eds.), Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 1-26. 2016.Concerns both about the nature of free will and about the credibility of theistic belief and commitment have long preoccupied philosophers. This is just to make the obvious point that philosophical questions about whether we enjoy free will and about whether God exists are truly perennial. In addition, there can be no denying that the history of philosophical inquiry into these two questions has been dynamic and, at least to some degree, integrated. In a great many cases, classical answers to th…Read more
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1Leeway vs. Sourcehood Conceptions of Free WillIn Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith & Neil Levy (eds.), Routledge Companion to Free Will., Routledge. pp. 213-224. 2017.One reason that many of the philosophical debates about free will might seem intractable is that dierent participants in those debates use various terms in ways that not only don't line up, but might even contradict each other. For instance, it is widely accepted to understand libertarianism as\the conjunction of incompatibilism [the thesis that free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism] and the thesis that we have free will" (van Inwagen (1983), 13f; see also Kane (2001), 17; Pere…Read more
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The Best Thing in Life is Free: The Compatibility of Divine Freedom and God's Essential Moral PerfectionIn Hugh J. McCann (ed.), Free Will and Classical Theism: The Significance of Freedom in Perfect Being Theology, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 133-151. 2016.A number of scholars have claimed that, on the assumption of incompati- bilism, there is a con ict between God's freedom and God's essential moral perfection. Jesse Couenhoven is one such example; Couenhoven, a com- patibilist, thinks that libertarian views of divine freedom are problematic given God's essential moral perfection. He writes, \libertarian accounts of God's freedom quickly run into a conceptual problem: their focus on con- tingent choices undermines their ability to celebrate divin…Read more
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1Freedom as Sensitive to Reasons, Habits, and CharacterIn Gregory R. Peterson & Kevin S. Reimer (eds.), Habits in Mind: Integrating Theology, Philosophy, and the Cognitive Science of Virtue, Emotion, and Character Formation, Brill. pp. 196-212. 2017.
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36Paradise and Growing in VirtueIn T. Ryan Byerly & Eric J. Silverman (eds.), Paradise Understood: New Philosophical Essays about Heaven, Oxford University Press. pp. 97-109. 2017.The present volume is devoted to philosophical reflection on the nature of paradise. Our contribution to this larger project is an extension of previous work that we’ve done on the nature of human agency and virtue in heaven. Here, we’d like to focus on three things. First, we will discuss in greater detail what it is we mean by “growth in virtue.” Second, we will answer a number of objections to that understanding of growth in virtue. Third, we will show two benefits of this understanding of gr…Read more
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2070Cooperative Grace, Cooperative AgencyEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 7 (3): 223--245. 2015.In an earlier paper, I argued for an account of the metaphysics of grace which was libertarian in nature but also non-Pelagian. My goal in the present paper is to broaden my focus on how the human and divine wills relate in graced activities. While there is widespread agreement in Christian theology that the two do interact in an important way, what’s less clear is how the wills of two agents can be united in one of them performing a particular action via a kind of joint or unitive willing. Inso…Read more
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20Review of Freedom and Self-Creation: Anselmian Libertarianism (review)American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90 (4): 765-767. 2016.
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127An Argument for LimboThe Journal of Ethics 19 (3-4): 277-292. 2015.In this paper I argue from a number of positions that are, while not uncontested, at least common among analytic philosophers of religion for the possibility, and indeed the plausibility, of a doctrine of limbo. The account of limbo that I advocate is substantially different than the element of Catholic speculative theology that goes by the same name. According to that doctrine, the limbus infantium is a place or state of perfect natural happiness for those who, prior to the age of reason, die w…Read more
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59Disability and the Theodicy of DefeatJournal of Analytic Theology 5 100-120. 2017.Marilyn McCord Adams argues that God’s goodness to individuals requires God to defeat horrendous evils; it is not enough for God to outweigh these evils through compensatory goods. On her view, God defeats the evils experienced by an individual if and only if God’s goodness to the individual enables her to integrate the evil organically into a unified life story she perceives as good and meaningful. In this essay, we seek to apply Adams’s theodicy of defeat to a particular form of suffering. We …Read more
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61The Dialectic Role of the Flickers of FreedomPhilosophical Studies 131 (2): 337-368. 2006.One well-known incompatibilist response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples is the ‘flicker-of-freedom strategy’. The flicker strategy claims that even in a Frankfurt-style counterexample, there are still morally relevant alternative possibilities. In the present paper, I differentiate between two distinct understandings of the flicker strategy, as the failure to differentiate these two versions has led some philosophers to argue at cross-purposes. I also explore the respective dialectic roles th…Read more
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72On Analytic TheologyScientia et Fides 3 (2): 1-13. 2015.My primary aims in this paper are to give an overview of a recent movement which goes by the name of ‘analytic theology’, to locate that movement within the larger context of contemporary philosophy of religion, and to identify some of the weakness or objections that analytic theology will need to address moving forward. While I think that some of these objections have merit, I also think that the promise of analytic theology’s contribution to theology more broadly is, in my view, sufficiently r…Read more
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23Free will: sourcehood and its alternativesContinuum. 2012.An important and engaging book on a key argument in contemporary debates about free will and moral responsibility.
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157Causal History Matters, but Not for IndividuationCanadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (1): 77-91. 2009.In ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,’ Harry Frankfurt introduces a scenario aimed at showing that the having of alternative possibilities is not required for moral responsibility. According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), an agent is morally responsible for her action only if she could have done otherwise; Frankfurt thinks his scenario shows that PAP is, in fact, false. Frankfurt thinks that the denial of PAP gives credence to compatibilism, the thesis that …Read more
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807Heavenly Freedom: A Response to CowanFaith and Philosophy 30 (2): 188-197. 2013.In a recent issue of Faith and Philosophy, Steven Cowan calls into question our success in responding to what we called the “Problem of Heavenly Free- dom” in our earlier “Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will in Heaven.” In this reply, we defend our view against Cowan’s criticisms.
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151Source incompatibilism and its alternativesAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 44 (2): 143-155. 2007.In current debates about moral responsibility, it is common to differentiate two fundamentally different incompatibilist positions: Leeway Incompatibilism and Source Incompatibilism. The present paper argues that this is a bad dichotomy. Those forms of Leeway Incompatibilism that have no appeal to ‘origination’ or ‘ultimacy’ are problematic, which suggests that incompatibilists should prefer Source Incompatibilism. Two sub-classifications of Source Incompatibilism are then differentiated: Narrow…Read more
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50Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump (edited book)Routledge. 2009.This volume focuses on contemporary issues in the philosophy of religion through an engagement with Eleonore Stump’s seminal work in the field. Topics covered include: the metaphysics of the divine nature ; the nature of love and God’s relation to human happiness; and the issue of human agency
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78Free willInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2006.Most of us are certain that we have free will, though what exactly this amounts to is much less certain. According to David Hume , the question of the nature of free will is “the most contentious question of metaphysics.” If this is correct, then figuring out what free will is will be no small task indeed. Minimally, to say that an agent has free will is to say that the agent has the capacity to choose his or her course of action. But animals seem to satisfy this criterion, and we typically thin…Read more
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15Arguing about religion (edited book)Routledge. 2009.Methodological issues in philosophy of religion -- God's existence and nature -- Evil and divine hiddenness -- Providence and interaction -- The afterlife -- Religion and contemporary life.
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82Routledge Companion to Free Will. (edited book)Routledge. 2017.Questions concerning free will are intertwined with issues in almost every area of philosophy, from metaphysics to philosophy of mind to moral philosophy, and are also informed by work in different areas of science. Free will is also a perennial concern of serious thinkers in theology and in non-western traditions. Because free will can be approached from so many different perspectives and has implications for so many debates, a comprehensive survey needs to encompass an enormous range of approa…Read more
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1379Pride in Christian Philosophy and TheologyIn Joseph Adam Carter & Emma C. Gordon (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Pride, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 211-234. 2017.Our focus in this chapter will be the role the pride has played, both historically and contemporarily, in Christian theology and philosophical theology. We begin by delineating a number of different types of pride, since some types are positive (e.g., when a parent tells a daughter “I’m proud of you for being brave”), and others are negative (e.g., “Pride goes before a fall”) or even vicious. We then explore the role that the negative emotion and vice play in the history of Christianity, with pa…Read more
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78Grace and Controlling What We Do Not CauseFaith and Philosophy 24 (3): 284-299. 2007.Eleonore Stump has recently articulated an account of grace which is neither deterministic nor Pelagian. Drawing on resources from Aquinas’s moral psychology, Stump’s account of grace affords the quiescence of the will a significant role in an individual’s coming to saving faith. In the present paper, I firstoutline Stump’s account and then raise a worry for that account. I conclude by suggesting a metaphysic that provides a way of resolving this worry. The resulting view allows one to maintain …Read more
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41Demotivating SemicompatibilismIdeas Y Valores 58 (141): 109-124. 2009.In this paper, I explore some of the motivations behind John Martin Fischer's semi-compatibilism. Particularly, I look at three reasons Fischer gives for preferring semi-compatibilism to libertarianism. I argue that the first two of these motivations are in tension with each other: the more one is m.
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1108Envy and Its DiscontentsIn Timpe Kevin & Boyd Craig (eds.), Virtues and Their Vices, Oxford University Press. pp. 225-244. 2013.Envy is, roughly, the disposition to desire that another lose a perceived good so that one can, by comparison, feel better about one’s self. The divisiveness of envy follows not just from one’s willing against the good of the other, but also from the other vices that spring from it. It is for this second reason that envy is a capital vice. This chapter begins by arguing for a definition of envy similar to that given by Aquinas and then considers its relationship to other vices (e.g. jealousy, sc…Read more
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90Truth-Making and Divine EternityReligious Studies 43 (3). 2007.According to a widespread tradition in philosophical theology, God is necessarily simple and eternal. One objection to this view of God's nature is that it would rule out God having foreknowledge of non-determined, free human actions insofar as simplicity and eternity are incompatible with God's knowledge being causally dependent on those actions. According to this view, either (a) God must causally determine the free actions of human agents, thus leading to a theological version of compatibilis…Read more
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55Moral characterInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2007.At the heart of one major approach to ethics—an approach counting among its proponents Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas—is the conviction that ethics is fundamentally related to what kind of persons we are. Many of Plato’s dialogues, for example, focus on what kind of persons we ought to be and begin with examinations of particular virtues: What is the nature of justice? Republic) What is the nature of piety? Euthyphro) What is the nature of temperance? Charmides) What is the nature of co…Read more
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