Alexander R. Pruss

Sceptical theism claims that we have vast ignorance about the realm of value and the connections, causal and modal, between goods and bads. This ignorance makes it reasonable for a theist to say that God has reasons beyond our ken for allowing the horrendous evils we observe. But if so, then does this not lead to moral paralysis when we need to prevent evils ourselves? For, for aught that we know, there are reasons beyond our ken for us to allow the evils, and so we should not prevent them. This paralysis argument, however, shall be argued to rest on a confusion between probabilities and expected utilities. A connection between this paralysis argument and Lenman's1 discussion of the butterfly effect and chaos will be drawn, and the solution offered will apply in both cases.

This thesis examines the alethic modal concepts of possibility and necessity. It is argued that one cannot do justice to all our modal talk without possible worlds, i.e., complete ways that a cosmos might have been. I argue that not all of the proposed applications of possible worlds succeed but enough remain to give one good theoretical reason to posit them. The two central problems now are: What feature of reality makes correct alethic modal claims true and What are possible worlds? ;David Lewis makes possible worlds be concretely existing universes. Unfortunately, I show Lewis's account involves set-theoretic, ethical, inductive and probabilistic paradoxes, and commits Lewis to an objectionable form of primitive modality that governs the choice of the counterpart relation. The most promising contemporary alternatives to Lewis's theory have been the worlds of Adams and Plantinga constructed out of Platonic entities such as maximal collections of consistent propositions. However, these approaches fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of what makes true modal claims true. I also criticize some alternative accounts. ;Finally, I discuss and combine two historical approaches. The first is an Aristotelian approach that says a non-actual event is possible is to say that some actual substances could have initiated a causal chain that could lead up to the event in question. However, it can be shown that some plausible global possibility claims can be made true on this account only if there is a necessarily existent first cause capable of initiating very different universes. On the other hand, Leibniz made possible worlds be ideas in the mind of an omniscient necessarily existent deity. Leibniz fails to explain what it is that makes these possible worlds possible, but if we were willing to combine his story with the conclusion drawn from the Aristotelian one, we could get the following story: Possible worlds are ideas in the mind of an omniscient deity and what makes them possible is that this deity has the Aristotelian capability of initiating causal chains that can lead to them being actualized

Consider the regularity thesis that each possible event has non-zero probability. Hájek challenges this in two ways: there can be nonmeasurable events that have no probability at all and on a large enough sample space, some probabilities will have to be zero. But arguments for the existence of nonmeasurable events depend on the axiom of choice. We shall show that the existence of anything like regular probabilities is by itself enough to imply a weak version of AC sufficient to prove the Banach–Tarski Paradox on the decomposition of a ball into two equally sized balls, and hence to show the existence of nonmeasurable events. This provides a powerful argument against unrestricted orthodox Bayesianism that works even without AC. A corollary of our formal result is that if every partial order extends to a total preorder while maintaining strict comparisons, then the Banach–Tarski Paradox holds. This yields an argument that incommensurability cannot be avoided in ambitious versions of decision theory

Suppose that one initiates a causal sequence leading to a basically evil state of affairs, but does not intend the evil effect, and the good effects of the action are proportionate to the bad. A state of affairs is a “basic evil” provided it is evil in virtue of itself and not in virtue of its connection with other states of affairs. The classic form of the Principle of Double Effect (PDE) can be taken to state that then the action that initiated the causal sequence is not wrong on account of the basically evil state of affairs it produces. The action might still be wrong for some other reason, say by violating a promise, or causing some other basically evil state of affairs, or being a..

P. F. Strawson a critiqué le compte de Leibniz de 1'individuation, en demandant pourquoi il est métaphysiquement impossible pour qu'il y ait des consciences indiscernables mais distincts. L'analogie entre la conscience et la monade est centrale pour Leibniz, et done la critique de Strawson met en question la nécessité métaphysique du principe de l'identité des indiscernables . Par un examen de quelques questions dans le système ontologique de Leibniz, nous défendrons la nécessité métaphysique du PII contre Strawson

We introduce three arguments for the thesis that time cannot exist prior to an original creation event. In the first argument, we seek to show that if time doesn’t depend upon creation, then time is infinite in the backwards direction, which is incompatible with arguments for a finite past. In the second and third arguments, we allow for the possibility of backwards-infinite time but argue that God could not have a sufficiently good reason to refrain from creating for infinitely many moments—either in a world void of created things or in the actual world prior to creation. Our end goal is to help clarify connections between time and divine action.

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.

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...

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.

Consider the reasonable axioms of subjunctive conditionals if p → q1 and p → q2 at some world, then p → at that world, and if p1 → q and p2 → q at some world, then → q at that world, where p → q is the subjunctive conditional. I show that a Lewis-style semantics for subjunctive conditionals satisfies these axioms if and only if one makes a certain technical assumption about the closeness relation, an assumption that is probably false. I will then show how Lewisian semantics can be modified so as to assure and even when the technical assumption fails, and in fact in one sense the semantics actually becomes simpler then

Patrick Toner has argued that eternalism, the doctrine that all times are ontologically on par, conflicts with the Catholic view of judgment as based on the state of the soul at death. For, he holds, it is arbitrary that judgment should be based on what happened at some particular time, unless, as presentism holds, that time is the only that really exists. I shall argue that his argument fails because the eternalist can say that judgment is simultaneous with the state of soul that is being judged, and there is nothing arbitrary about judging something at t on the basis of its state at the same time t.