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1God's Freedom, God's CharacterIn Kevin Timpe & Daniel Speak (eds.), Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 277-293. 2016.My goal in this chapter is to consider the connection between an agent’s moral character and those actions that she is capable of freely performing. Most of these connections hold for all moral agents, but my particular focus will be on the specific case of divine agency. That is, I’m primarily interested in the connection between God’s moral character and His exercise of His free agency. As I will argue, even if an agent’s character determines her choices or actions, that doesn’t threaten the a…Read more
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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. 2016.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. 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 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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1189Cooperative 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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83Truth-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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73Free WIllIn Neil Manson & Bob Barnard (eds.), Continuum Companion to Metaphysics, Continuum. pp. 223-243. 2012.It is sometimes said that Augustine discovered the faculty of the will, and as a result inaugurated philosophy’s fascination with issues related to free will. While philosophers prior to Augustine clearly discussed related issues of, for example, voluntariness and agency, one finds in Augustine a focus on a faculty distinct from reason which is necessary for praise and blame that one would be hard-pressed to find in earlier thinkers. Augustine addressed the importance of free will in many of his…Read more
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132A critique of Frankfurt-libertarianismPhilosophia 34 (2): 189-202. 2006.Most libertarians think that some version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) is true. A number of libertarians, which I call ‘Frankfurt-libertarians,’ think that they need not embrace any version of PAP. In this paper, I examine the writings of one such Frankfurt-libertarian, Eleonore Stump, for her evaluation of the impact of Frankfurt-style counterexamples (FSCs) to PAP. I show how, contrary to her own claims, Stump does need a PAP-like principle for her account of free action…Read more
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85Why Christians Might be Libertarians: A Reply to Lynne Rudder BakerPhilosophia Christi 6 (2): 89-98. 2004.
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33Review of Philosophical Theology and Christian Doctrine (review)Faith and Philosophy 25 (3): 329-331. 2008.
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424Incompatibilism, Sin, and Free Will in HeavenFaith and Philosophy 26 (4): 396-417. 2009.The traditional view of heaven holds that the redeemed in heaven both have free will and are no longer capable of sinning. A number of philosophers have argued that the traditional view is problematic. How can someone be free and yet incapable of sinning? If the redeemed are kept from sinning, their wills must be reined in. And if their wills are reined in, it doesn’t seem right to say that they are free. Following James Sennett, we call this objection to the traditional view of heaven ‘the Prob…Read more
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54Executive Function, Disability, and AgencyRes Philosophica 93 (4): 767-796. 2016.This paper considers how a number of particular disabilities can impact agency primarily by affecting what psychologists refer to as ‘executive function.’ Some disabilities, I argue, could decrease agency even without fully undermining it. I see this argument as contributing to the growing literature that sees agency as coming in degrees. The first section gives a broad outline of a fairly standard approach to agency. The second section relates that framework to the existing literature, which su…Read more
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69An Analogical Approach to Divine FreedomProceedings of the Irish Philosophical Society 88-99. 2012.Assuming an analogical account of religious predication, this paper utilizes recent work in the metaphysics of free will to build towards an account of divine freedom. I argue that what actions an agent is capable of freely performing depends on his or her moral character.
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80Free Will in Philosophical TheologyBloomsbury Academic. 2013.Natural theology's name can be misleading, for it sounds like what is being done is a kind of theology, not philosophy. But natural theology is better understood to be primarily philosophical rather than theological for it is, most generally, the ...
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161Tracing and the Epistemic Condition on Moral ResponsibilityModern Schoolman 88 (1/2): 5-28. 2011.In “The Trouble with Tracing,” Manuel Vargas argues that tracing-based approaches to moral responsibility are considerably more problematic than previously acknowledged. Vargas argues that many initially plausible tracing-based cases of moral responsibility turn out to be ones in which the epistemic condition for moral responsibility is not satisfied, thus suggesting that contrary to initial appearances the agent isn’t morally responsible for the action in question. In the present paper, I outli…Read more
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21Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 2016.This volume presents a systematic exploration of the relationship between religious beliefs and various accounts of free will in the contemporary domain. With a particular eye on how theological commitments might shape our views about the nature of free will, a team of leading experts in the field explores an important gap in the current debate. They focus their attention on this crucial point of intellectual intersection with surprising and illuminating results.
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34Review of Rethinking Responsibility (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (1): 205-206. 2014.No abstract
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88Freedom and the IncarnationPhilosophy Compass 11 (11): 743-756. 2016.In this paper, we explore how free will should be understood within the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, particularly on the assumption of traditional Christology. We focus on two issues: reconciling Christ's free will with the claim that Christ's human will was subjected to the divine will in the Incarnation; and reconciling the claims that Christ was fully human and free with the belief that Christ, since God, could not sin.
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13Review of Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (1): 138-141. 2005.
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33Review of Living with Uncertainty: The Moral Significance of Ignorance (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 9. 2009.
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54Neo-classical TheismIn Jeanine Diller & Asa Kasher (eds.), Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities, Springer. pp. 195-204. 2013.This is a section introduction which attempts to capture current neo-classical approaches to the nature of God. I begin by introducing the distinction between classical and neo-classical ways of conceiving the divine nature. I then I attempt to rebut a general objection to neo-classical models by drawing a comparison with the development of orthodoxy. I close by introducing the four readings in this section of the volume, and show how they each relate to the larger discussion of neo-classical m…Read more
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