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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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1198Cooperative 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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85Why Christians Might be Libertarians: A Reply to Lynne Rudder BakerPhilosophia Christi 6 (2): 89-98. 2004.
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34Review 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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56Executive 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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81Free 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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162Tracing 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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22Free 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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55Neo-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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126An 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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58Disability 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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95The 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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Disability |
Virtue Ethics |
Philosophy of Religion |
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