Alexander R. Pruss

The pseudonymous author of this article argues that neither Kierkegaard nor Climacus in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript are claiming that Christian beliefs are nonsense or contradictory, but that it is contrary to universal epistemic norms to believe these beliefs or even to believe they can be believed. In an appendix for which the rest of the article is a preparation the author gives an interpretation of the pseudonymity and form-content contradiction and of how Kierkegaard in a sense agrees with all the assertions made in the Postscript. If Kierkegaard is right, this article could only have been written pseudonymously.

SpinozaÂ’s God is a being with infinite attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence. Does this mean that God has infinitely many attributes, each of which expresses infinite essence, or does God simply have attributes, each of which is infinite and expresses infinite essence? SpinozaÂ’s argumentation in Letter 9 and the Scholium to Prop. I.10 clearly indicates that it is not just each individual attribute that is infinite, but there are in some sense infinitely many of them. This would seem to settle the issue, except that Spinoza never talks of more than two attributes, Extension..

I shall discuss the problem of the definition of lying and the formulation of the duty of truthtelling. I shall argue that the morality of assertion is a special case of the morality of endorsement, and that a criterion of adequacy for an account of lying is that it handles certain cases of dishonest endorsement as well. Standardviews of lying fail to do so. I shall offer an account of the duty of honest endorsement in terms of the intention to avoid falsehood. But, in the end, we may simplyhave reason to go back to the naïve view that lying is saying falsehoods.

Our paper ‘A new cosmological argument’ gave an argument for the existence of God making use of the weak Principle of Sufficient Reason (W-PSR) which states that for every proposition p, if p is true, then it is possible that there is an explanation for p. Recently, Graham Oppy, as well as Kevin Davey and Rob Clifton, have criticized the argument. We reply to these criticisms. The most interesting kind of criticism in both papers alleges that the W-PSR can be justifiably denied by the atheist, and constitutes no improvement on the strong Principle of Sufficient Reason (S-PSR) which claims that every true proposition in fact has an explanation. The criticism is predicated on the fact that it can be shown that the W-PSR entails the S-PSR. We argue that the W-PSR's plausibility remains despite the criticisms. From this it can be seen to follow that the entailment relation between the W-PSR and the S-PSR gives one reason to believe the S-PSR.

A recombinationist like the earlier Armstrong (1989) claims that logically possible worlds are recombinations of items found in the actual world, with some items reduplicated if need be and others deleted. An immediate consequence of this is that if an alien property is a property that could only be defined in terms of fundamental properties that are actually uninstantiated, then it is logically impossible that an alien property be instantiated as no recombination of the items in the actual world can yield a world with an entity having such a property. Recombinationism immediately implies that S5 is false. To see this, suppose for simplicity, as I will throughout this paper, that electric charge is a fundamental property--otherwise, a different example would have to be used. Then, let w be a possible world lacking any charged objects. At w, then, it is true that it is logically impossible that there be a charged particle since no recombination of the entities in w yields a charged particle. Therefore, contrary to S5, what is possible at w differs from what is possible at the actual world, since charged particles are actual and hence logically possible at the actual world. While this argument may make one sceptical of recombinationism, the recombinationist will say that it is not surprising that if we follow out the Aristotelian intuition that possibility is to be grounded in actually existing entities, then what is possible will depend on what is actual. Henceforth I will no longer assume S5, and so logical possibilities will have to be relativized to worlds if recombinationism is true: it is logically possible at the actual world for charged particles to exist, but at a world at which there are no charged particles it is logically impossible for charged particles to exist...